Former Harvard President Summers to Speak at Yale

Economist Lawrence H. Summers will speak at Yale on “Learning from and Responding to Financial Crisis” on April 29 and 30 at 4 p.m. in the Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, Room 114, corner of Grove and Prospect streets.

His talks, part of the Arthur M. Okun Lecture Series, are free and open to the public.

Summers, the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University, was the 27th president of that university from 2001 to 2006. From 1999 to 2001 he served as secretary of the U.S. Treasury following his earlier service as deputy and under secretary of the Treasury and as chief economist of the World Bank. Prior to his years in Washington, Summers was a professor of economics at Harvard and MIT. He earned his B.S. from MIT and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard.

Summers’s many honors include the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to an outstanding American economist under the age of 40, and the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award for outstanding scientific achievement — the first ever given to a social scientist. He is a member of the National Academy of Science.

Among his other activities, Summers writes a monthly column for the Financial Times, co-edits the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and serves as a managing director of D.E. Shaw, a major alternative investment firm. He also serves on a number of not for profit and for profit boards.

This event is co-sponsored by the Yale Department of Economics and Yale University Press.