110th Annual Conference Keynote Speakers

Lawrence H. Summers

Lawrence H. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus of Harvard University. During the past two decades, he has served in a series of senior policy positions in Washington, D.C., including the 71st Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton, Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama and Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist of the World Bank.

He received a bachelor of science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and was awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982. In 1983, he became one of the youngest individuals in recent history to be named as a tenured member of the Harvard University faculty. In 1987, Mr. Summers became the first social scientist ever to receive the annual Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation (NSF), and in 1993 he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40.

He is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University and the Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Amy Finkelstein

Amy Finkelstein is the John & Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America, a research center at MIT designed to encourage and facilitate randomized evaluations of important domestic policy issues. She is also the co-Director of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

She has received numerous awards and fellowships including the John Bates Clark Medal (2012), given annually to the economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. Other awards include the American Society of Health Economists’ ASHEcon Medal (2014), awarded biennially to the economist age 40 or under who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2009), the American Economic Association’s Elaine Bennett Research Prize (2008) and a Sloan Research Fellowship (2007). She has also received awards for graduate student teaching (2012) and graduate student advising (2010) at MIT.

She is one of the two Principal Investigators for the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a randomized evaluation of the impact of extending Medicaid coverage to low income, uninsured adults.