Videos

Fiction can be an invaluable classroom resource even for those whose specialty is not Religion and Literature. Lucy Pick, Senior Lecturer in the Divinity School, Director of the Religious Studies major, and author of the novel Pilgrimage, and Noah T...

A celebration of the life and work of Gary S. Becker (1930-2014) was held at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Memorial Chapel on October 31, 2014. The speakers were Robert J. Zimmer, President of the University; Judy Becker, daughter of Gary B...

Assar Lindbeck presented a paper on how social norms, moral hazard, and those incentive structures interact–how do norms keep people from gaming the system? How can optimum insurance contracts enforce them, or even harness them to improve the welfare...

Richard Blundell examined the mechanisms by which a family unit acts as a sort of labor insurance against shocks like job and wage loss. By looking at the interactions between time allocations and consumption expenses within families, he argues that we...

Keynote Address by James Heckman and remarks by Robert J. Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago, and Lars Peter Hansen, the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the College. James Heckman is the Henr...

Pierre-André Chiappori presented work strongly in the tradition of his friend and colleague Gary Becker—and inspired by two key Becker insights: human capital investment and assortative matching. Rather than separating the two, Chiappori considers h...

In this presentation, Scott Duke Kominers noted that mechanism design tends to examine only the market clearing stage. The field treats human capital as a fixed or predetermined input, rather than a dynamic range of possibilities. His own model uncover...

Efforts to persuade are an important part of economic activity. Advertising, promotions, political campaigns, and parental teachings within a household are just a few examples of economic persuasion. So what does the economic approach to human behavior...

What is the rate of return to schooling? This question—so central to Gary Becker's pioneering work on human capital— motivated the paper that James J. Heckman presented at the conference honoring his late colleague. In it, Heckman attempts to quant...

In work that combined these two strands of Becker’s work, Edward Lazear showed that countries with a younger population had greater levels of entrepreneurship. In “older” countries with a higher median age, the rates of entrepreneurship are lower...