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.

Douglas Irwin will deliv the 35th Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture on Thursday, March 26, 2026. As with recent Kuznets events, the lecture will be followed by a mini-conference featuring research on Trade Reform, Exchange Rates, and Economic History.

Douglas Irwin is the John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. He is president-elect of the Economic History Association (2022-23). He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He worked on trade policy issues while on the staff of President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers and later worked in the International Finance Division at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on international trade, particularly in the areas of U.S. trade policy, economic history, and the impact of trade on economic growth.