Rate My Professor Lawrence Summers

Lawrence Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard University, with faculty appointments in the Department of Economics and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. A distinguished scholar in Business & Economics, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1982. In 1983, he became one of the youngest individuals in recent history to receive tenure at Harvard, following earlier roles as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of Economics at MIT. His academic positions at Harvard have included Professor of Economics from 1983 to 1987 and Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy from 1987 to 1991. Summers' research specializations include macroeconomics, public economics, finance, international policy, and labor economics. He has made seminal contributions through works such as "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets" (1990, with J.B. De Long, A. Shleifer, and R.J. Waldmann), "Hysteresis and the European Unemployment Problem" (1986, with O.J. Blanchard), "Mean Reversion in Stock Prices: Evidence and Implications" (1988, with J.M. Poterba), and books including "Understanding Unemployment" (MIT Press, 1990) and "Tax Policy and the Economy" (editor, MIT Press, 1987-1990 editions).