Seminars and Research

McGee Public Policy Lecture Series

Friday, April 5th, 2013, Wilson Hall room 126
(4:00-5:30 p.m. with a reception immediately following)

William Nordhaus

Sterling Professor of Economics; Cowles Foundation, Yale University

William Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico (which is part of the United States). He completed his undergraduate work at Yale University in 1963 and received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been on the faculty of Yale University since 1967 and has been Full Professor of Economics since 1973. He is also Professor in Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Professor Nordhaus lives in downtown New Haven with his wife Barbara, who works at the Yale Child Study Center.

Nordhaus is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is on the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Cowles Foundation for Research, and has been a member and senior advisor of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, Washington, D.C. since 1972. Professor Nordhaus is current or past associate editor of several scientific journals. He was the first chair of the Advisory Committee for the Bureau of Economic Analysis and of the American Economic Association Committee on Federal Statistics. In 2004, he was awarded the prize of “Distinguished Fellow” by the American Economic Association.

From 1977 to 1979, he was a Member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. From 1986 to 1988, he served as the Provost of Yale University. He is currently Deputy Chair of the Board of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. He has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences including the Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems, the Panel on Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, the Committee on National Statistics, and the Committee on the Implications for Science and Society of Abrupt Climate Change. He chaired a Panel of the National Academy of Sciences that produced a report, Nature's Numbers which recommended approaches to integrate environmental and other non-market activity into the national economic accounts.

He is the author of many books, among them Invention, Growth and Welfare, Is Growth Obsolete?, The Efficient Use of Energy Resources, Reforming Federal Regulation, Managing the Global Commons, Warming the World, and (joint with Paul Samuelson) the classic textbook, Economics, whose nineteenth edition was published in 2009. His most recent book on economic modeling of climate change, A Question of Balance (Yale University Press, 2008), was selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2008.

Professor Nordhaus has also studied wage and price behavior, health economics, augmented national accounting, the political business cycle, and productivity. His 1996 study of the economic history of lighting back to Babylonian times found that the measurement of long-term economic growth has been significantly underestimated. He returned to Mesopotamian economics with a study of the costs of the U.S. war in Iraq, published before the war began, projecting a total cost as high as $2 trillion.

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MCGEE LECTURE ARCHIVES

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012
"The Career-Family Conundrum"
Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University
[video]

Thursday, March 24th, 2011
"Inequality at Birth: Some Causes and Consequences"
Janet Currie, Sami Mnaymneh Professor of Economics, Columbia University
[video]

Thursday, February 19, 2009
"The Financial Crisis and the Recession: What is Happening and What Should the Government Do About It"
Robert E. Hall, Robert and Carole McNeil Hoover Senior Fellow and Professor of Economics, Stanford University

Monday, December 1, 2008
"The Case for Inheritance Taxation"
Robin Boadway, David Chadwick Smith Chair in Economics at Queen's University
[video]

Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
"Income, aging, health and wellbeing: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll"
Angus Deaton, Princeton University

Monday, December 3rd, 2007
"Holdup, Assest Ownership, and Reference Points"
Oliver Hart, Harvard University

Wednesday, January 31, 2007
"Lawlessness and Economics: Alternative Institutions of Economic Governance"
Avinash Dixit, Princeton University

Thursday, November 3, 2005
"Monetary Policy in Brazil"
Marcelo Kfoury Muinhos, Central Bank of Brazil

Thursday, September 16, 2004
Topic: Politics and trade agreements
Mickey Kantor, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce

Wednesday, January 21, 2004
"Healthy, Wealthy and Wise? The Causal Pathways between Health and Socioeconomic Status"
Daniel McFadden, University of California, Berkeley, Nobel Laureate 2000

Thursday, March 27, 2003
"Social Security Reform"
Peter Diamond, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nobel Laureate 2010

Wednesday April 17, 2002
"Life Earnings and Economic Development"
Robert E. Lucas, Jr, University of Chicago, Nobel Laureate 1995