Join us for the Stamp Memorial Lecture which this year will be delivered by Lawrence H Summers. In this event, Professor Summers will be in conversation with Professor Silvana Tenreyro. 

Meet our speaker and chair

Lawrence H Summers (@LHSummers) is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard University. He served as the 71st Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton and the Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama, and as the Chief Economist of the World Bank.

He received a bachelor of science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and was awarded a PhD from Harvard in 1982. In 1983, he became one of the youngest individuals in recent history to be named as a tenured member of the Harvard University faculty. In 1987, Mr Summers became the first social scientist ever to receive the annual Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation (NSF), and in 1993 he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40.

He is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University and the Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Silvana Tenreyro is Professor in Economics at the London School of Economics. She obtained her MA and PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Before joining the Bank, she was co-Director and Board member of the Review of Economic Studies and Chair of the Women’s Committee of the Royal Economics Society. She is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). Since 1 January 2021, she is the President of the European Economic Association.

More about this event

This lecture is in memory of Josiah Charles Stamp who obtained a degree in economics from LSE in 1916. His thesis was published as British Incomes and Property in 1916 and launched his academic career. In 1919 he served on the Royal Commission on Income Tax and in the same year he joined Nobel Industries Ltd as secretary and director from which Imperial Chemical Industries later developed. In 1926 he became the president of the executive of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway and two years later he was appointed director of the Bank of England. He also served as a governor and vice chairman of LSE. Stamp also held lectureships in economics at several universities, including Cambridge, Oxford and Liverpool. In 1938 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Stamp of Shortlands, Kent. Stamp died on 16 April 1941. In 1942 a trust was set up jointly by the Bank of England, the London Midland and Scottish Railway, ICI and the Abbey Road Building Society to pay for the organisation of a Stamp memorial lecture.

Recent Stamp Lectures have been delivered by Esther Duflo and Olivier Blanchard.

This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series imagining what the world could look like after the crisis, and how we get there.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEStamp