Department of Economics

William Comanor ’59 has endowed a fund for an annual Spring event, featuring a public talk by an eminent economist followed by a banquet for our senior class to celebrate his or her work.

• 2010 Michael Spence, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize for his work on the dynamics of information flows and market development.
• 2011 Paul Krugman, recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize, and New York Times columnist.
• 2012 Raghiram Rajan, Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, and recipient of the distinguished inaugural Fisher Black Prize awarded by the American Finance Association.
• 2013 Esther Duflo, Professor of Economics at MIT and recipient of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal and recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize.
• 2014 Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University. Policy Dilemmas in the Aftermath of Financial Crises. 
   Full talk on Vimeo.
• 2015 Alvin Roth Professor of Economics at Stanford University and recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize for his work on the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. "The Economist as Engineer: The New Economics of Matching and Market Design". 
  View the talk here.
• 2016 Claudia Goldin, recipient of the 2023 Nobel Prize, Henry Lee Professor of Economics, Harvard University. "Career & Family: Collision or Confluence".
• 2017 Christina Romer, Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, "In the Wake of Disaster: The Great Recession in Historical Perspective".
• 2018 Susan Athey, The Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, "Big Data, News and Ride Sharing: Aggregators, Intermediaries and Product Quality".
• 2019 Matthew Rabin, Pershing Square Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Harvard Economics Department and Harvard Business School, "The Economic and Policy Implications of how we mispredict our own future behavior and tastes".
• 2020 (talk cancelled due to COVID-19) David Card, recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize, Professor of Economics at the University of California Berkeley, "Are We Under-investing in Education?"
• 2021 Raj Chetty, William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics, Harvard University, "Improving Equality of Opportunity in America: New Insights from Big Data?"
• 2022 David Card, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley; 1995 American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Prize recipient; 2021 Co-recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021. "Economics and Public Policy: Lessons from the Minimum Wage and Immigration"
• 2023 Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Poverty"
• 2024 Emi Nakamura, Chancellor's Professor of Economics UC Berkeley, "Natural Experiments to Guide Macroeconomic Policy"