Lawrence Summers

Lawrence H. Summers is President Emeritus of Harvard University. During the past two decades he has served in a series of senior policy positions, including Vice President of development economics and chief economist of the World Bank, Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, Director of the National Economic Council for the Obama Administration from 2009 to 2011, and Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, from 1999 to 2001.

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. He and his wife Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard, reside in Brookline with their six children.

Selected Publications

Academic Journal/Scholarly Articles

• Eggertsson, Gauti B., Neil R. Mehrotra, Sanjay R. Singh, and Lawrence H. Summers. "A Contagious Malady? Open Economy Dimensions of Secular Stagnation." MF Economic Review 64.4 (November 2016).
• Summers, Lawrence H. "Secular Stagnation and Monetary Policy." Review 98.2 (2nd Quarter 2016): 93-110.
• Eggertsson, Gauti B., Neil R. Mehrotra, and Lawrence H. Summers. "Global Reserve Assets in a Low Interest Rate World: Secular Stagnation in the Open Economy." The American Economic Review 106.5 (May 2016).
• Mahbubani, Kishore, and Lawrence H. Summers. "The Fusion of Civilizations: The Case for Global Optimism." Foreign Affairs 95.3 (May 2016): 126.
• Yamey, Gavin, Jesper Sundewall, Helen Saxenian, Robert Hecht, Keely Jordan, Marco Schäferhoff, Christina Schrade, C. Deleye, M. Thomas, N. Blanchet, Lawrence H. Summers. "Reorienting Health Aid to Meet Post-2015 Global Health Challenges: A Case Study of Sweden as a Donor." Oxford Review of Economic Policy 32.1 (March 2016): 122-146.

Book Chapters

Summers, Lawrence H. "2014: US Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound." The Best of Business Economics. Palgrave McMillan US, 2016, 421-435.