Join us for the Stamp Memorial Lecture which this year will be delivered by Susan Athey, the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. 

Digital interventions are well-suited for social impact applications because they are relatively inexpensive to develop and update, they can be targeted to meet the needs of individuals, and they are highly scalable. This talk will review several recent implementations of digital technology to social impact applications, including childhood literacy, programs to enable career transitions and demonstrate skills, and digital assistants that help workers and service providers be more effective. In each case, a new digital product was developed and evaluated in the field. The evidence shows that the interventions work better for some types of individuals than others, illustrating the importance of targeting interventions where they are most effective.

Meet our speaker and chair

Professor Susan Athey (@Susan_Athey) is the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University and her PhD from Stanford, and she holds an honorary doctorate from Duke University.

She previously taught at the economics departments at MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Science and is the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economics Association to the economist under 40 who has made the greatest contributions to thought and knowledge. Her current research focuses on the economics of digitization, marketplace design, and the intersection of econometrics and machine learning. She has worked on several application areas, including timber auctions, internet search, online advertising, the news media, and the application of digital technology to social impact applications. As one of the first “tech economists,” she served as consulting chief economist for Microsoft Corporation for six years, and has served on the boards of multiple private and public technology firms. She also served as a long-term advisor to the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, helping architect and implement their auction-based pricing system. She was a founding associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and she is the founding director of the Golub Capital Social Impact Labopen in new window at Stanford GSB.

In 2022, she took leave from Stanford to serve as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division.  Professor Athey is the 2023 President of the American Economics Association, where she previously served as Vice President and Elected Member of the Executive Committee.

Eric Neumayer is the School’s Deputy President and Vice Chancellor as well as Vice President and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Planning and Resources). Prior to this he held the positions of Head of the Department of Geography & Environment, Vice-Chair of the Appointments Committee and in September 2016 he became LSE’s inaugural Vice President and Pro-Vice Chancellor Faculty Development. He is also Professor of Environment and Development in the Department of Geography and Environment.

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.

Podcast

A podcast of this event is available to download from Designing and evaluating digital interventions for social impact. The presentation from the lecture can also be viewed via the following link. 

Podcasts and videos of many LSE events can be found at the LSE Public Lectures and Events: podcasts and videos channel.

Hashtag for this event: #LSEEvents