Thomas Piketty to deliver economics lecture at Northwestern

Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, will deliver the Susan Bies Lecture on Economics and Public Policy at Northwestern University at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 18

Picketty, who will lecture on “Rising Inequality and Globalization,” is the author of numerous articles published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, Explorations in Economic History, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales and a dozen books. 

Hosted by the University’s department of economics, the lecture will be held at the Kellogg Global Hub, White Family Auditorium (second floor), 2211 Campus Drive, on the University’s Evanston campus. 

Piketty has done major historical and theoretical work on the interplay between economic development, the distribution of income and wealth and political conflict. In particular, he is the initiator of the recent literature on the long-run evolution of top income shares in national income (now available in the World Inequality Database). These works have led scholars to radically question the optimistic relationship between development and inequality posited by Kuznets, and to emphasize the role of political, social and fiscal institutions in the historical evolution of income and wealth distribution. He is also the author of the international best-seller “Capital in the 21st Century.” 

The Susan Bies Lecture on Economics and Public Policy was launched in 2008 in honor of Northwestern alumna Susan Schmidt Bies. Bies, who earned her doctorate in economics from Northwestern in 1972, served in various capacities during a long career, including on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2001 until 2007. The lecture will alternate between microeconomic and macroeconomic topics.