Economist Oriana Bandiera will deliver the 34th Kuznets Lecture on poverty traps and labor economics

Note to Attendees: The Kuznets lecture will be held at Yale in Kline Tower, 219 Prospect Street, 14th floor and is open to the public. Seating is limited to 115 and will be first come, first served. Attendees are encouraged to arrive 10-15 minutes in advance to claim a seat. Those attending virtually can register for the simulcast below.

Oriana Bandiera will deliver the 2025 Kuznets lecture, “Development and the Organization of Labor,” on Thursday, February 27 from 4-5:30pm. Bandiera is the Sir Anthony Atkinson Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics.  

One of the topics Bandiera plans to cover is her research on “poverty traps” and programs to provide poor individuals pathways to higher incomes. 

“By accident of history, a person will be born poor, and that is what keeps them poor – what we call a poverty trap,” she explained. “Poverty traps are by definition sticky: once you’re in the trap, you likely stay in the trap. It’s important to help people before they fall into the trap, because once they’re in, it’s expensive to get them out.” 

Bandiera and her coauthors published a paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2022 giving results from an 11-year study of 6,000 households in Bangladesh that began in extreme poverty and were given productive assets – cows – to allow them to run small livestock businesses. The results showed that households largely began by misallocating their labor, but the assets provided them effective means to escape poverty traps. 

The Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture is an annual event hosted by the Yale Economic Growth Center since 1987 and features a prominent economist speaking on issues in economic development. This event honors Simon Kuznets, the famous Belarusian-American economist who helped establish the Yale Economic Growth Center in 1961.  

As with every Kuznets Lecture since 2020, the lecture will be followed by a mini-conference the next day, showcasing cutting-edge research by early-career researchers on topics covered in the lecture. 

Bandiera was surprised at the extent of control she would have over the program. "[EGC Director Rohini Pande] invited me to do the lecture, and I was very honored. But I completely didn't understand that the conference was also about this body of work. I was very humbled once I put two and two together and started planning the lineup. It's wonderful." 

The event will be held at Yale in Kline Tower, 219 Prospect Street, 14th floor and is open to the public. Seating is limited to 115 and will be first come, first served. Attendees are encouraged to arrive 10-15 minutes in advance to claim a seat. Registration for the simulcast is open now. The mini-conference is co-organized by Erika Deserranno of Bocconi University and Ameet Morjaria of Northwestern University and is open to invitees only. A full schedule is on EGC’s website.  

Oriana Bandiera is 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) program at IZA. Her broader research focuses on organizations and labor markets, how they affect the process of development, and how they are affected by it.