Research Lectures

The Johns Hopkins Distinguished Lectures in Economics

This annual lecture series brings prominent economists and their leading research from other universities and research institutions. Each visiting lecturer gives several presentations on their work during their time on campus.

The series began in 1998 and was originally named after Richard T. Ely, a founder of the American Economic Association and a department faculty member from 1881 to 1892. It was renamed the Johns Hopkins Distinguished Lectures in Economics in 2020 because some of Ely’s views were deemed to be inconsistent with the honor of a named distinguished lecture series.

Recent Lectures

Newcomb Lectures

This lecture honors Simon Newcomb, who was an autodidact and polymath. Newcomb was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in 1884, and editor of the American Journal of Mathematics for many years. He was a rear admiral in the United State Navy, and was active in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he was president in 1877. 

Newcomb wrote two books of economics, works that M. Friedman describes as “classics of economic science,” and J. M. Keynes says were “one of those original works which a fresh scientific mind … is able to produce from time to time.” He was credited by Irving Fisher with the first-known enunciation of the quantity theory of money.

The Newcomb Lecturers do not need to be members of an economics department. They should be working on economic questions with non-trivial mathematical content.

Recent Lectures

2021/22 – Francesca Molinari (Cornell): “Identification and Information-Based Inference in Models with Set-Valued Predictions”
Francesca Molinari is H. T. Warshow and Robert Irving Warshow Professor in the Department of Economics at Cornell University.
Lecture: Wednesday, April 6th, 2022
Title: “Identification and Information-Based Inference in Models with Set-Valued Predictions”

2018/19 – Maxwell B. Stinchcombe (University of Texas at Austin): “Models of Numbers: Pragmatics and Economic Theory”
Maxwell B. Stinchcombe is the E.C. McCarty Centennial Professor at University of Texas at Austin.
Lecture: Wednesday, October 10th, 2018
Title: “Models of Numbers: Pragmatics and Economic Theory”

2017/18 – Faruk Gül (Princeton): “Revealed Preference and Behavioral Economics”
Faruk Gül is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Economics at Princeton University.
Lecture: Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Title: “Revealed Preference and Behavioral Economics”

2014/15 – Rosa Matzkin (University of California, Los Angeles): “Unobservables in Economic Models”
Rosa Matzkin, the Charles E. Davidson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Lecture: Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Title: “Unobservables in Economic Models”

2012/13 – Stephen Morris (Princeton): “Robust Strategic Analysis”
Stephen Morris is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics at Princeton University.
Lecture: Monday, October 1, 2012
Title: “Robust Strategic Analysis”

  • 2011/12 – Steve Durlauf (Wisconsin University): “The Social Economy”
  • 2010/11 – Paul Milgrom (Stanford University): “Assignment Exchanges”
  • 2009/10 – Alexander Ioffe (Technion): “Variational analysis and mathematical economics”
  • 2008/09 – Rohit Parikh (Graduate Center at CUNY): “Social Software and the Logic of Knowledge”

Conferences Honoring Our Faculty

The department has hosted multiple conferences in honor of our faculty, bringing experts and the campus community together to discuss key research and trends in economics.