Williams Distinguished Lectureship Series

“Whither Meritocracy”

2025 Speaker- Dr. Steven Durlauf

Frank P. Hixon Distinquished Service Professor and the Director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

Dr. Steven Neil Durlauf is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor and the Director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

Durlauf's research spans many topics in economics. His most important substantive contributions involve the areas of poverty, inequality and economic growth. Much of his research has attempted to integrate sociological ideas into economic analysis. His major methodological contributions include both economic theory and econometrics. He helped pioneer the application of statistical mechanics techniques to the modelling of socioeconomic behavior and has also developed identification analyses for the empirical analogs of these models. Other research has focused on techniques for policy evaluation and the econometrics of cross-country income differences. Durlauf is also known as a critic of the use of the concept of social capital by social scientists and has also challenged the ways that agent-based modelling and complexity theory have been employed by social and natural scientists to study socioeconomic phenomena.

Durlauf received a BA in economics from Harvard in 1980, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1986. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, a Fellow of the International Association of Applied Econometrics, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.

 

“Inflation, Economic Growth, and AI: It’s All about Productivity”

2024 Speaker- Chad Syverson

George C. Tiao Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Chad Syverson's research spans several topics, with a particular focus on the interactions of firm structure, market structure, and productivity. His research has been published in several top journals and has earned multiple National Science Foundation Awards. He also coauthored (with Austan Goolsbee and Steve Levitt) an intermediate-level text, Microeconomics.

"My engineering background definitely spurred my research interest in productivity. I like to visit factories and investigate how things are put together, what can go wrong when they are, and what factors influence companies’ operating success (or lack thereof)."

Syverson is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has served on National Academies committees and as the chair of the Chicago Census Research Data Center Board. Prior to his appointment at the University of Chicago, Syverson was a mechanical engineer for Loral Defense Systems and Unisys Corporation.

He earned bachelor's degrees in 1996 from the University of North Dakota in economics and mechanical engineering. He earned his PhD in economics in 2001 from the University of Maryland. Syverson joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 2008.