Economica Coase-Phillips Lectures

People form their policy views based on many concerns related to fairness, self-interest, and beliefs about the impacts. Social economic surveys and experiments can help us better understand how people reason and make decisions about policies that affect their lives in important ways. This talk will consider tax policy, climate change policies, trade policy, and measures to act against inflation.

 

The 1958 Phillips curve was a masterpiece of macro analysis, showing a highly curved relationship between wage inflation and unemployment. But this was linearized by Samuelson and Solow in 1960, and for the next 60 years moved from being a “curve” to a “line”. We revisit this using rich global macro data and UK micro data from the Bank of England Decision Maker Panel to argue the “curve” is alive and well. Indeed, the curviness of the Phillips relationship was one factor behind the great inflation of 2021-2024. Firm-level prices rise about 3 times faster in response to positive demand shocks than they fall in response to negative demand shocks. So, the large cross-sectional spread of demand shocks in the COVID drop and rebound seems to have generated a surge in overall inflation. It appears the importance (and curviness) of Phillip’s ground-breaking 1958 paper continues to live on.

 

How, when, and why did women in the US obtain legal rights equal to men’s regarding the workplace, marriage, family, Social Security, criminal justice, credit markets, and other parts of the economy and society, decades after they gained the right to vote? The story begins with the civil rights movement and the somewhat fortuitous nature of the early and key women’s rights legislation. The women’s movement then formed to press for further rights. Of the 155 critical moments in women’s rights history from 1905 to 2023, 45% occur between 1963 and 1973. The greatly increased employment of women, the formation of women’s rights associations, and the unstinting efforts of various members of Congress were behind the advances. But women became splintered far more than did men. A substantial group of women emerged in the 1970s to oppose various rights for women, just as they did during the suffrage movement. They remain a powerful force today.

 

During the last two years, inflation has re-emerged in the developed world together with concerns about it being persistent. Previous inflationary episodes have taught us a lot on what causes inflation and what can be done to reduce it. But the world has changed, and previous insights may no longer be valid. Professor Werning discusses how old insights extended with new frameworks can be used to shed light on the recent surge in inflation.

 

Professor Guido Tabellini presents Economica Phillips 2022 lecture: Institutional and Cultural Bifurcation: The Great Divergence between China and Europe.

Why was Europe and not China the hub of modern economic growth and of modern democracy?  And how can we explain the divergent evolution of political institutions between these two areas? The lecture will emphasize how the divergent institutional trajectories of China and Europe emerged at the turn of the first millenium from different social organizations and cultural traditions. Both in China and in Europe, state institutions were built on top of other social organizations. But during the Middle Ages, when the State was absent or not far reaching, society was organized in very different ways in these two parts of the world. In China, most local public goods were provided by kin-based social networks, like clans. In Europe, cooperation took place within self-governing corporate organizations like monasteries, universities, guilds, free towns. These different social structures left an indelible imprint in the subsequent evolution of legal and political institutions, and contribute to explain the Great Divergence between China and Europe.

 

 

Bob Gibbons will speak about value creation—both within organizations and in other organized activities, in settings that require relational contracts.  He will focus on relational contracts that are difficult to build, asking whether ideas and techniques associated with organizational culture might be useful in building such relational contracts. 

 

 

Hélène Rey is the Lord Bagri Professor of Economics at London Business School. Until 2007, she was at Princeton University, as Professor of Economics and International Affairs in the Economics Department and the Woodrow Wilson School.

Her research focuses on the determinants and consequences of external trade and financial imbalances, the theory and empirics of financial crises and the organization of the international monetary system.

A podcast of this event is available to download from Monetary Policy and Financial Cycles.

A video of this event is available to watch at Monetary Policy and Financial Cycles.

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

 

LSE alumnus Thomas Piketty (@PikettyLeMonde) is Professor at EHESS and the Paris School of Economics.

He is the author of numerous research articles and of a dozen books.

He has done historical and theoretical work on the interplay between economic development, the distribution of income and wealth, and political conflict.

He is also co-director of the World Inequality Lab and the World Inequality Database.

He is the author of the international best-sellers Capital in the 21st Century (2014) and Capital and Ideology (2020).

 

 

Professor Rohini Pande is the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale.

Pande is an economist whose research examines the economic costs and benefits of informal and formal institutions in the developing world and the role of public policy in effecting change.

Her work has examined how institutions - ranging from electoral to financial - can be designed to empower historically disadvantaged groups; how low-cost improvements in information collection and dissemination can enable flexible regulation and more efficient outcomes in areas as diverse as environmental protection and elections; and how biased social norms, unless challenged by public policy, can worsen individual well-being and reduce economic efficiency.

Pande earned her undergraduate degree from Delhi University, her M.A. from Oxford University, and her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics.

This online public event is free and open to all but pre-registration is required. 

Registration for this event will open on Monday 16 November after 10am. 

Watch the video and listen to the podcast.

 

This online public event is free and open to all but pre-registration is required. 

Registration for this event will open on Thursday 21 May after 10am. 

Carmen M. Reinhart, just named chief economist and vice president at the World Bank, is the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. She was Senior Policy Advisor and Deputy Director at the International Monetary Fund and held positions as Chief Economist and Vice President at the investment bank Bear Stearns. 

She serves in the Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  Her book (with Kenneth S. Rogoff)  entitled This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly documents the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterized financial history. It has been translated to over 20 languages and won the Paul A. Samuelson Award.

She has been listed among Bloomberg Markets Most Influential 50 in Finance, Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, and Thompson Reuters' The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds.  In 2018 she was awarded the King Juan Carlos Prize in Economics and NABE’s Adam Smith Award, among others.

Podcast

A podcast of this event is available to download from LSE Player.

Professor Pinelopi Goldberg is the Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale University. She is currently on public service leave from Yale while acting as the Chief Economist of the World Bank Group. She served as the Editor-in-Chief of the American Economic Review from 2011 to 2017, and Coeditor from 2007 to 2010. Pinelopi is currently Vice-President of the American Economic Association, Second Vice-President of the Econometric Society (to serve as President in 2021), and President of the Eastern Economic Association.

Oriana Bandiera (Chair) is Professor of Economics and Sir Anthony Atkinson Chair in Economics at LSE, and Director of STICERD.

Podcast

A podcast of this event is available to download from LSE Player.

Slides
A copy of the PowerPoint presentation is available here.

Philippe Aghion is a professor at the College de France and LSE, and a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Oriana Bandiera (@orianabandiera) is a Professor of Economics and the Director of the Suntory and Toyota Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD) at the London School of Economics.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECoase

Info: This event is free and open to all with no ticket or pre-registration required - further information from LSE Events.

Recordings: Audio recording on Soundcloud

The Annual Economica Phillips lecture is jointly sponsored by the journal Economica and the Department of Economics.

Christina Duckworth Romer is the Class of 1957 Garff B Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration.

Francesco Caselli (chair) is Norman Sosnow Professor of Economics at LSE.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPhillips

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required - further information from LSE Events.

 

Marianne Bertrand is an applied micro-economist whose research covers the fields of labor economics, corporate finance, and development economics. Her research in these areas has been published widely, including numerous research articles in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Finance.

Oriana Bandiera (chair) (@orianabandiera) is a Professor of Economics and the Director of the Suntory and Toyota Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD) at the London School of Economics. 

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECoase

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required - further information from LSE Events.

Recordings: Video recording on YouTube, Recordings and slides on LSE Media page

Professor Pindyck, one of the world’s leading microeconomists, will discuss his recent work, which focuses on economic policies relating to rare disasters.

Robert Pindyck is an American economist, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance at Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received bachelor degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics from MIT. in 1966, a master's degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1967, and a PhD in Economics from MIT in 1971.

Ian Martin is a Professor of Finance at the LSE. He received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Before moving to LSE, he was an Associate Professor of Finance at Stanford GSB. His research interests include cross-country contagion in financial markets; the valuation of long-dated assets; catastrophes; derivative pricing; and forecasting in financial markets. Professor Martin is the Programme Director of the LSE's MSc in Finance and Economics, and is an editor of Economica. 

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECoase

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required - further information from LSE Events.

Recordings: Video recording on YouTube, Recordings on LSE Media page

Slides

The annual Phillips Lecture, jointly sponsored by the journal Economica and the Department of Economics, in which Professor Hall, one of the world's leading macroeconomists will speak on the macroeconomics of persistent slumps.

The annual Phillips Lecture, jointly sponsored by the journal Economica and the Department of Economics, in which Professor Hall, one of the world's leading macroeconomists will speak on the macroeconomics of persistent slumps.    

Robert Hall is an American economist and a Robert and Carole McNeil Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution and Professor of Economics at Standford University. He is generally considered a macroeconomist, but he describes himself as an "applied economist".

Bob Hall received a BA in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in Economics from MIT for thesis titled Essays on the Theory of Wealth under the supervision of Robert Solow. He is a member of the Hoover Institution, the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow at both American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and a member of the NBER, where he is the program director of the business cycle dating committee. Hall served as President of the American Economic Association in 2010.

Francesco Caselli (chair) is the Norman Sosnow Chair in Economics at the Department of Economics at LSE.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEPhillips

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required - further information from LSE Events.

Recordings: Video recording on YouTube, Recordings and slides on LSE Media page

Even before the financial crisis many developed economies were facing growing inequality and struggling to maintain employment and earnings. This lecture will dig deeper into the background to these trends and will examine the evidence on how tax and welfare reform impacts on human capital, inequality and earnings.

It will ask two general questions: What are the key margins where we might expect tax and welfare reform to have most impact on earnings, employment growth and inequality?  How has this changed in the light of the great recession?

The talk will consider prospects for the future and the potential for policy reform.

Professor Sir Richard Blundell CBE FBA is Ricardo Professor at University College London and Research Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He is an alumnus of LSE.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECoase         

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required - further information from LSE Events.

Slides

Recordings: Video recording on YouTube, Recordings on LSE Media page

For an overview of the lecture, please visit the Department's Storify page.

Drawing on work on rare macroeconomic disasters, this lecture will argue that optimal environmental investment can be a significant share of GDP even with standard values for the rate of time preference and the expected rate of return on private capital.

The Stern Review’s evaluation of environmental protection relies on extremely low discount rates, an assumption criticized by many economists. The Review also stresses that great uncertainty is a critical element for optimal environmental policies. An appropriate model for this policy analysis requires sufficient risk aversion and fat-tailed uncertainty to get into the ballpark of explaining the observed equity premium. A satisfactory framework, based on Epstein-Zin/Weil preferences, also separates the coefficient of relative risk aversion (important for results on environmental investment) from the intertemporal elasticity of substitution for consumption (which matters little). Calibrations based on existing models of rare macroeconomic disasters suggest that optimal environmental investment can be a significant share of GDP even with reasonable values for the rate of time preference and the expected rate of return on private capital. Optimal environmental investment increases with the coefficient of relative risk aversion and the probability and typical size of environmental disasters but decreases with the degree of uncertainty about policy effectiveness.  The key parameters that need to be pinned down are the proportionate effect of environmental investment on the probability of environmental disaster and the baseline probability of environmental disaster.

Robert J Barro is Paul M Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEBarro

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required - further information from LSE Events.

This event will be webcast live on the LSE website on LSE Live.

Recordings: Video recording on YouTube, Recordings and slides on LSE Media page

During the last decade the analysis of foreign trade and investment has been re-oriented toward the roles played by firms with different characteristics. This has been enabled by the emergence of rich data sets that provide new stylised facts on trade and investment. In response, new theoretical models have been developed to explain these patterns and to re-examine a host of issues, such as the effects of trade policy on productivity and trade openness on inequality. The lecture will review these developments.

Elhanan Helpman is the Galen L Stone Professor of International Trade at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He holds a BA degree in Economics and Statistics from Tel Aviv University, an MA degree in Economics from the same institution, and a PhD degree in Economics from Harvard University. He was the Archie Sherman Professor of International Economic Relations at Tel Aviv University before moving to Harvard.

Helpman is a confounder of the "new trade theory" and the "new growth theory", which emphasise the roles of economies of scale and imperfect competition. he was Co-Editor of the Journal of International Economics, Editor of the European Economic Review, and I currently an Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He is a member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. He was President of the Israeli Economic Association and President of the Econometric Society. He received the Mahalanobis Memorial medal, the Bernhard Harms Prize, the Rothschild Prize, the EMET Prize, the Nemmers Prize, the Onassis Prize and the Israel Prize.

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required

Labour markets across the OECD reacted differently to the financial crisis of 2009 and the debt crisis that followed. Professor Pissarides will review these different responses, seek explanations for them, and draw conclusions about labour market policy in recession. The focus will be on unemployment and how to contain its rise in light of the negative shocks to economic activity.

Christopher Pissarides is the Norman Sosnow Chair in Economics, LSE, and recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #lsework

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required - further information from LSE Events.

Recordings: Video recording on YouTube, Recordings and slides on LSE Media page

Authority and power permeate political, social, and economic life - yet there is limited empirical knowledge about the motivational origins and consequences of authority. Based on an experimental approach, Ernst Fehr's lecture will explore the psychological consequences of authority for important economic interactions. He will document the human desire to exercise authority, the motivation-enhancing effect of possessing authority and the detrimental motivational effects of a lack of authority.

Ernst Fehr is director of the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich. He has conducted influential research on the role of social preferences in competition, cooperation and incentive provision.

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required - further information from LSE Events.

Recordings: Video recording on YouTube, Recordings on LSE Media page

Combining an historical approach with macroeconomic theory, Thomas Sargent will discuss ways of thinking about American fiscal and monetary policies - exploring how contradictions have developed and how they have been resolved.

Thomas Sargent is professor of economics at New York University and senior fellow at Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required - further information from LSE Events.

Recordings: Video recording on YouTube, Recordings on LSE Media page

Professor Jean Tirole is one of the world's most eminent economists working in the fields of industrial organisation, banking and finance and game theory, and economics and psychology. He is director of the Fondation Jean-Jacques Laffont-Toulouse School of Economics, scientific director of the Institute d' Economie Industrielle in Toulouse and a visiting professor at MIT. Professor Tirole will speak on 'Individual and Corporate Social Responsibility'.

Recordings: Audio recording on LSE Media page

The Department of Economics is delighted to announce that the 2008 Economica Phillips Lecture will be given by Robert Lucas, the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. One of the world's leading authorities on monetary theory, growth and development, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1995.

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required - further information from LSE Events.

In this inaugural Coase lecture, Oliver Hart will discuss how his recent work with John Moore on contracts as reference points can be used to shed light on the theory of the firm.

Oliver Hart is the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has been teaching since 1993. A major authority on contract theory, the theory of the firm, and corporate finance, he has published numerous articles in leading scientific journals, as well as in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

Info: Event free and open to all with no ticket or registration required - further information from LSE Events.