James Heckman to give the Sandmo Lecture
Nobel laureate and economist Professor James Heckman will hold The Sandmo Lecture on 13 January 2015.
09.01.2015 - Astri Kamsvåg
The title of his lecture is "The market and nonmarket benefits of education".
Time: Tuesday 13 January at 12.15 pm
Venue: Auditorium Agnar Sandmo, NHH
James Heckman is an expert in the economics of the economics of education and, and is considered to be among the ten most influential economists in the world. Heckman shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2000 with Daniel McFadden for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics.
Heckman is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Director at the Center for the Economics of Human Development - both at the University of Chicago, and a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation.
Heckman's research is devoted to understanding the origins of major social and economic problems related to inequality, social mobility, discrimination, skill formation and regulation, and to devising and evaluating alternative strategies for addressing those problems.
His research recognizes the diversity among people in skills, family origins, peers, and preferences as well as the diversity of institutions and regulations and the consequences of this diversity for analyzing and addressing social and economic problems. This activity entails conducting extensive empirical studies on a range of questions guided by economic and social theory. It also entails developing new economic and statistical tools to frame questions, to analyze them, and to guide the formulation and implementation of sound economic and social policies. He was one of the first to develop tools for measuring economic outcomes when people self-select into education and the labor market, and disentangle the returns to education per se and the returns to selection.
Heckman's work is rooted in economics. He collaborates across disciplines to get to the heart of major problems. His recent interdisciplinary research on human development and skill formation over the life cycle draws on economics, psychology, genetics, epidemiology, and neuroscience to examine the origins of inequality, the determinants of social mobility, and the links among stages of the life cycle, starting in the womb. His focus in the recent years has been on early investment or pre-school invest in human capital, and how the early investment is a requirement and complementary to later investments ("dynamic complementarities").
Heckman's research statement: The Economics of Human Flourishing
"I am interested in the economics of human flourishing, or the circumstances under which people are able to develop the skills to thrive in our current economy. These encompass the conventional, cognitive sense of the word (education, on-the-job training) as well as the noncognitive sense (such as the qualities of perseverance and accountability). I develop theoretical models of parental choice and child preference formation, as well as intergenerational models of family influence. I also estimate dynamic models of the evolution of skills and capacities using longitudinal data."
The Sandmo Lecture
The Sandmo Lecture on Public Policy was established at NHH in 2008 in honour of Professor Agnar Sandmo. Sandmo is among Norway's foremost researchers in economics, and he has published influential work in a number of fields.
The Sandmo Junior Visiting Fellowship to Jonas Hjort
At the same time as the establishment of The Sandmo Lecture NHH also established a guest scholarship for promising researchers under the age of 40. This year's recipient of The Sandmo Junior Visiting Fellowship in Public Policy is Assistant Professor Jonas Hjort at Columbia Business School.
Before coming to Columbia, Professor Hjort received a BSc Economics from the London School of Economics, an MA International & Development Economics from Yale and a Ph.D. Economics from UC Berkeley. His research spans issues in development, labor and behavioral economics, with a particular focus on topics in their intersection.
The recipient of the guest scholarship is invited to visit the department of economics at NHH for a month and to give a guest lecture. The title of his lecture is "Firms' response and unintended health consequences of industrial regulations".
Time: 14 January at 12.15 pm
Venue: The institute room E209, Department of Economics
Read more about previous Sandmo Lectures
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