Keynote speakers > Kaushik Basu

Kaushik Basu is the Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank. He was recently appointed President-Elect of the International Economic Association. Prior to joining the World Bank, he served as Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and is currently on leave from Cornell University where he is Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies. Kaushik is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and received India’s Padma Bhushan award as well as the National Mahalanobis Memorial award. His contributions span development economics, welfare economics, industrial organization, game theory (he crafted the traveller's dilemma), political economy and seminal work on the economics of child labor. In addition to Cornell, he has taught at the Delhi School of Economics, Harvard, Princeton and MIT. He has published widely, including more than 160 papers in refereed journals and scholarly volumes, and has contributed articles to many widely read magazines and newspapers. He has authored several books including Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a new Economics (Princeton University Press and Penguin). Kaushik is the second World Bank Chief Economist from a developing country and the first from India. He has invented the Dui-doku, a competitive two-player version of Sudoku.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016 - 3:45 pm

"A New Approach to Law and Economics"

Abstract: Law and economics deals with wide-ranging topics, from competition and environmental policy to crime control, and has been influential in shaping our thinking. Yet its success has fallen short of its potential. The discipline’s shortcomings are nowhere as visible as in developing economies, where a common refrain is how the law looks good on paper but does not get implemented. This lecture will demonstrate that there is a methodological flaw that underlies much of contemporary law and economics, and argue that there is an intimate connection between human beliefs and expectations, on the one hand, and the effectiveness of the law, on the other. I propose a new approach to law and economics that is rooted in game theory and rectifies the flaw. It will be argued that this approach can open up new areas of research and be marshalled to address some of the more pressing policy challenges of our time.

credit photo: CC BY-SA 3.0