Much of traditional economics makes no reference to morals. Yet we know from our experience, even if not from our textbooks, that morals matter, affecting not just social and political outcomes, but economic growth and welfare. The lecture will delve into this subject, showing that the connection between moral behavior and economic outcomes is more complex than may appear at first sight. It will be shown that, in strategic environments with many individuals, having the moral intention may not be sufficient. In fact, it can backfire, causing a deterioration in overall welfare. The lecture will delve into questions of how we can solve this challenge of morality, answering some questions but also leaving some open ones for the future.

Date: 22 December 2021 (Wednesday) at 8.00 PM IST

The lecture is available on the Department Youtube channel: Video

Press coverage: Anandabazar Patrika

Esther Duflo is Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. She is better known for her action oriented work on poverty, micro-credit and education at the grass root level. She is the founder and Co-Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Alleviation Lab (popularly known as J-PAL). Duflo’s research, based on random evaluation methods, is path breaking and has opened up a new horizon in the social sciences. Her research has substantially advanced our understanding of how incentives, policies and institutions can improve education and health outcomes, and reduces poverty levels. Her book, written in collaboration with Professor Abhijit Banerjee, “Poor Economics” needs no introduction. Professor Duflo at present is the Editor of American Economic Review.

Jean Tirole was born in Troyes in France. After having studied engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, he turned his interests to economics and mathematics. In 1981 he received his doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US. He maintained his connections to MIT, in part as a professor of economics from 1984 to 1991. Since 1992 he has worked at the School of Economics at the University of Toulouse in France.

Tirole is chairman of the board of the Jean-Jacques Laffont Foundation at the Toulouse School of Economics, and scientific director of the Industrial Economics Institute (IDEI) at Toulouse 1 University Capitole. After receiving his doctorate from MIT in 1981, he worked as a researcher at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées until 1984. From 1984–1991, he worked as Professor of Economics at MIT. His work by 1988 helped to define modern industrial organization theory by organising and synthesising the main results of the game-theory revolution vis-à-vis understanding of non-competitive markets.

From 1994 to 1996 he was a Professor of Economics at the École Polytechnique. Tirole was involved with Jean-Jacques Laffont in the project of creating a new School of Economics in Toulouse. He is Engineer General of the Corps of Bridges, Waters and Forest, serving as Chair of the Board of the Toulouse School of Economics, Visiting Professor at MIT and Professor "cumulant" at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales since 1995. 

Dr. Rajan has a distinguished academic career. After graduating from the Engineering department, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, he completed his post-graduation in Business Administration from Indian Institute of Ahmedabad. He was a Gold Medallist at both levels. Dr. Rajan received a Ph.D. from MIT’s Sloan School of Management for his dissertation on banking. 

Subsequently, he joined the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business as a faculty in the Finance department in 1991. Since then he has held distinguished positions at various international organisations and served the Indian government in multiple capacities. Most notably, he was the Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund from 2003 – 2006 and Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India from 2012 – 2013, after which he was appointed as the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. 

Dr. Rajan has received several professional awards and distinctions throughout his distinguished career. In 2003, he won the Fisher Black Prize awarded by the American Finance Association for contributions to theory and practice of finance by an economist under the age of 40. He was elected as the president of the American Finance Association in 2011. In 2013, he was the recipient of the Deutsche Bank Prize for Financial Economics for ground breaking research on finance and macro-policy. In 2014, he was conferred the Best Central Bank Governor award by the Euromoney magazine and also the Governor of the Year award by the London based publication Central Banking. 

His 2010 book Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for 2010. At the time of giving the lecture, Dr. Rajan was Governor of Reserve Bank of India.

Prof. Dilip Mookherjee is an alumni of the Economics Department, Presidency University, batch of 1975. After completing his post graduation from Delhi School of Economics, he went to London School of Economics, where he completed his Masters and Ph.D.

After brief stints at Stanford University and Indian Statistical Institute Delhi, Prof. Mookherjee joined the Economics Department in Boston University, where he has been serving as Director of the Institute for Economic Development since 1998. He is also currently President of BREAD. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and has been recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal of the Indian Econometric Society. His current research interests are development economics, contract and organisation theory, and the Indian economy. Current projects include effectiveness of new forms of microfinance and provision of price information to farmers; land acquisition for industrialisation and compensation of displaced farmers; effects of reforms in bankruptcy and contract enforcement laws on credit markets; land reforms; deforestation; government accountability; decentralisation; trade middlemen and effects of globalisation; and theories of education, inequality and development.

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz is an American economist, public policy analyst, and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and is a former member and chairman of the (US president's) Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his contribution to risk aversion, informationa symmetry, and efficiency wage hypothesis, and for his critical view of the management of globalization, of laissez-faire economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists"), and of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. His book “Globalization and its discontents” (2002) reflected his staunch opposition to the policies of IMF-The World Bank.

In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 2001, and received that university's highest academic rank (university professor) in 2003. He was the founding chair of the university's Committee on Global Thought. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In 2009, the President of the United Nations General Assembly Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, appointed Stiglitz as the chairman of the U.N. Commission on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, where he oversaw suggested proposals and commissioned a report on reforming the international monetary and financial system. He served as chair of the international Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, appointed by President Sarkozy of France, which issued its report in 2010, Mismeasuring our Lives: Why GDP doesn't add up, and currently serves as co- chair of its successor, the High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. From 2011 to 2014, Stiglitz was president of the International Economic Association (IEA). Stiglitz has received more than 40 honorary degrees, including the Nobel prize in Economics, and the Legion of Honor.

Maitreesh Ghatak FBA is a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. He is an applied microeconomic theorist with research interests in economic development, public economics, microfinance, property rights, occupational choice, collective action,and the economics of organisations.

He did his schooling in Patha Bhavan, Kolkata and went on to do his undergraduate studies at Presidency College, Kolkata (1986-1989 batch). He has a M.A. in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics and completed his PhD in Economics from Harvard University under the supervision of Eric Maskin and Abhijit Banerjee.

He taught at the Department of Economics of University of Chicago before moving to the London School of Economics where he has taught since 2002. He has heldvisiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Yale University, Northwestern University, and the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He is currently a co-editor of Economica, a former managing editor of the Review of Economic Studies, a former editor in chief of the Journal of Development Economics, and a former co-editor of the Economics of Transition. He directs the research group Economic Organization and Public Policy (EOPP) at the LSE. He is the Lead Economist of the DFID-funded International Growth Centre's India (Bihar) programme. He is a board member of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, also known as the BREAD. He writes occasional essays in various newspapers and magazines on economic and political issues, in English as well as in Bengali. In July 2018 Ghatak was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).

Debraj Ray is a graduate of Presidency College in 1977. He completed his Masters and Ph.D. from Cornell University, where his supervisor was Prof. Mukul Majumdar. Ray has held long-term positions at Stanford University, the Indian Statistical Institute, and at Boston University, where he was Director of the Institute for Economic Development. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, MIT, the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the People's University of China in Beijing, the London School of Economics, Columbia University, and the Instituto de Análisis Económico in Barcelona. Ray is currently Julius Silver Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science, and Professor of Economics at New York University. He specializes in development economics and game theory. 

Debraj Ray is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal, and a recipient of the Outstanding Young Scientists Award in mathematics from the Indian National Science Academy. He received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching from Stanford University and the Gittner Award for Teaching Excellence in Economics from Boston University. He was awarded a Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa from the University of Oslo. Ray has served on the editorial board of Econometrica, the Journal of Economic Theory, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, the Japanese Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, American Economic Journal Microeconomics. He has served as a Foreign Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, and as Co-editor of the Econometric Society journal, Theoretical Economics.

His lecture slides are available here.

Amit Bhaduri was educated in Presidency College, Calcutta; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Cambridge University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1967. He has taught in various universities around the world as professor/ visiting professor, including Presidency College and Institute of Management, Calcutta; Delhi School of Economics and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum; El Colegio de Mexico; Stanford University; Vienna and Linz University, Austria; Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Bremen University, Germany; and Bologna and Pavia University, Italy.

 He has been a fellow of various institutes of advanced studies in Austria, Sweden, Germany, and Italy; worked on various expert bodies of the United Nations; and served as member on some national and international commissions. Bhaduri has published more than 60 papers in standard international journals and is currently on the editorial boards of five of them. He has written six books: The Economic Structure of Backward Agriculture (London: Academic Press, 1982), Macroeconomics: The Dynamics of Commodity Production (London: Macmillan, 1986), Unconventional Economic Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,1992), An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Liberalisation (coauthored with D. Nayyar) (India: Penguin, 1996), On the Border of Economic Theory and History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Development with Dignity (India: National Book Trust, 2006). Some of his books and articles have been translated into several European and Asian languages. 

Bhaduri is currently internationally selected professor (of ‘clear fame’) in Pavia University, Italy, and visiting professor in the Council for Social Development, Delhi University. He teaches in Italy part of the year and lives mainly in New Delhi. Amit Bhaduri was educated in Calcutta, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cambridge University, from where he received his PhD in 1967. Currently professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, he has held professorial and research positions in many countries, including Austria (Vienna and Linsz University, the Institute for Advanced Study and the Academy of Science), Germany (Bremen University, the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin), Italy (Bolognia University), Norway and Sweden (Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Social Sciences, Uppsala University and Trondheim University), and USA (Stanford University). He has served as research advisor and expert on many UN bodies and has been a member of various international commissions, including the European Commission on Unemployment and the Commission on Rural Finance. Amit Bhaduri has written nearly fifty articles in international journals and three books, The Economic Structure of Backward Agriculture, Macroeconomics: The Dynamics of Commodity Production and Unconventional Economic Essays. He is on the editorial board of five technical journals in economics published from Cambridge, the Hague, Karachi, Paris and Rome.

Prof. Bhaduri is currently Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and VistingProfessor, Council for Social Development.

Pranab Bardhan was a graduate of Presidency College in 1958. After completing his Masters in Calcutta University, he obtained a Ph.D. from Cambridge University., Following teaching appointments at MIT and the Delhi School of Economics, he has been at University of Berkeley since 19771currently as Emeritus Professor. Prof. Bardhan was the chief editor of the Journal of Development Economics for 1985-2003. He was the co-chair of the MacArthur Foundation- funded Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance for 1996-2007. He heldthe Distinguished Fulbright Siena Chair at the University of Siena, Italy in 2008-9. 

He is the BP Centennial Professor at London School of Economics for 2010 and 2011.He is the author of 12 books and more than 150 journal articles, and the editor of 12 other books. He has done theoretical and field studies research on rural institutions in poor countries, on political economy of development policies, and on international trade. A part of his work is in the interdisciplinary area of economics, political science, and social anthropology. His current research involves theoretical and empirical work on decentralized governance, and the political economy of development in China and India.