Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture Series

The Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture is an annual event hosted by the Yale Economic Growth Center since 1987, featuring a prominent economist speaking on issues in economic development. Since 2020, the Kuznets lecture has been combined with a mini-conference (typically the day after the lecture) that showcases cutting-edge research by early-career researchers on topics covered in the lecture. In Fall 2022, EGC launched the Kuznets Visiting Faculty Program, which brings economists to Yale for visits of 1-2 weeks.

The lecture series was founded by EGC Faculty members in 1986 to honor Simon Kuznets, who had helped found the Center. The series is dedicated to “Quantitative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations,” the title Kuznets gave to his pioneering series of ten short monographs that were published by Economic Development and Cultural Change between 1956 and 1967.

Born in 1901 in what is today Belarus, Kuznets helped launch the US national income statistics series in 1934. The motivation was to use data for policy – the statistics series was issued to meet the need to describe consistently and in detail the economic toll taken by the Great Depression. Post World War II, Kuznets saw a need for a center to do what his home institutions weren’t able to do – to use data to understand development. He believed Yale was the ideal home for such a venture and he worked with the chair of Yale’s economics department and Ford Foundation to set up EGC in 1961.

Kuznets went on to receive the Nobel Prize in 1971 for theoretical and empirical contributions to the measurement of economic growth, and remained a senior consultant for EGC until his death in 1985.

Oriana Bandiera (LSE) delivered the 34th Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture, “Development and the Organization of Labor,” on Thursday, February 27, 2025 from 4-5:30pm. As with recent Kuznets events, the lecture was followed by a mini-conference featuring research on related topics. The event was held at Yale in Kline Tower, 219 Prospect Street, 14th floor.

Bandiera is the Sir Anthony Atkinson Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and an honorary foreign member of the American Economic Association, a fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society, CEPR, BREAD, and IZA. She is co-editor of Econometrica, director of the Hub for Equal Representation at the LSE and of the Gender, Growth and Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries (G²LM|LIC) programme at IZA. Her research focuses on organizations and labor markets, how they affect the process of development, and how they are affected by it.