About

Lawrence H. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus of Harvard University. During the past three 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.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Virology
• Medicine
• Philosophy
• Macroeconomics
• Business
• Internal medicine
• Linguistics
• Labour economics
• Market economy
• Microeconomics
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• Salud global 2050: el camino para reducir a la mitad la muerte prematura

  Salud Pública de México · 2025-05-30

  articleOpen access

  En el informe Salud Global 2050, la Comisión de la revista The Lancet sobre la Inversión en Salud concluye que, para mediados de siglo, es posible lograr mejoras significativas en el bienestar humano con inversiones en salud focalizadas. El informe establece el objetivo de reducir en 50% la probabilidad de muerte prematura, es decir, morir antes de los 70 años, para el año 2050, respecto a 2019. Para lograr este objetivo conocido como "50 para el 50", se propone tratamiento de 15 afecciones prioritarias: ocho enfermedades infecciosas y afecciones maternas, y siete enfermedades no transmisibles y lesiones, las cuales, se anota, deberían ser subsidiadas por los gobiernos de los países que decidan invertir en dichas mejoras en materia de salud. Estas intervenciones también deberían reducir la morbilidad y la discapacidad. Además, se propone el fortalecimiento de los sistemas de salud mediante intervenciones costoefectivas y políticas como impuestos elevados al tabaco. Finalmente, el informe enfatiza en la preparación ante pandemias (debido al riesgo excepcionalmente alto de mortalidad) y un apoyo financiero integral y global para garantizar el desarrollo y la accesibilidad universal a servicios y tecnologías de salud.

  PublisherDOI

• The cost of money is part of the cost of living

  Economics Letters · 2025-12-04

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Technological Disruption in the Labor Market

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-01-01 · 13 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  This paper explores past episodes of technological disruption in the US labor market, with the goal of learning lessons about the likely future impact of artificial intelligence (AI). We measure changes in the structure of the US labor market going back over a century. We find, perhaps surprisingly, that the pace of change has slowed over time. The years spanning 1990 to 2017 were less disruptive than any prior period we measure, going back to 1880. This comparative decline is not because the job market is stable today but rather because past changes were so profound. General-purpose technologies (GPTs) like steam power and electricity dramatically disrupted the twentieth-century labor market, but the changes took place over decades. We argue that AI could be a GPT on the scale of prior disruptive innovations, which means it is likely too early to assess its full impacts. Nonetheless, we present four indications that the pace of labor market change has accelerated recently, possibly due to technological change. First, the labor market is no longer polarizing— employment in low- and middle-paid occupations has declined, while highly paid employment has grown. Second, employment growth has stalled in low-paid service jobs. Third, the share of employment in STEM jobs has increased by more than 50 percent since 2010, fueled by growth in software and computer-related occupations. Fourth, retail sales employment has declined by 25 percent in the last decade, likely because of technological improvements in online retail. The post-pandemic labor market is changing very rapidly, and a key question is whether this faster pace of change will persist into the future.

  PublisherDOI

• The Cost of Money is Part of the Cost of Living: New Evidence on the Consumer Sentiment Anomaly

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-02-01 · 5 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Unemployment is low and inflation is falling, but consumer sentiment remains depressed.This has confounded economists, who historically rely on these two variables to gauge how consumers feel about the economy.We propose that borrowing costs, which have grown at rates they had not reached in decades, do much to explain this gap.The cost of money is not currently included in traditional price indexes, indicating a disconnect between the measures favored by economists and the effective costs borne by consumers.We show that the lows in US consumer sentiment that cannot be explained by unemployment and official inflation are strongly correlated with borrowing costs and consumer credit supply.Concerns over borrowing costs, which have historically tracked the cost of money, are at their highest levels since the Volcker-era.We then develop alternative measures of inflation that include borrowing costs and can account for almost three quarters of the gap in US consumer sentiment in 2023.Global evidence shows that consumer sentiment gaps across countries are also strongly correlated with changes in interest rates.Proposed U.S.-specific factors do not find much supportive evidence abroad.

  PublisherDOI

• Global health 2050: the path to halving premature death by mid-century

  The Lancet · 2024-10-01 · 97 citations

  reviewOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication package for: Negative Nominal Interest Rates and The Bank Lending Channel

  2023-01-29

  datasetOpen access

  Package contains replication kit for "Negative Nominal Interest Rates and the Bank Lending Channel", including both replication of the empirical results and the theoretical simulations.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication package for: Negative Nominal Interest Rates and The Bank Lending Channel

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-01-29

  datasetOpen access

  Package contains replication kit for "Negative Nominal Interest Rates and the Bank Lending Channel", including both replication of the empirical results and the theoretical simulations.

  PublisherDOI

• Negative Nominal Interest Rates and the Bank Lending Channel

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2023-09-05 · 60 citations

  article

  Abstract We investigate the bank lending channel of negative nominal policy rates from an empirical and theoretical perspective. For the empirical results, we rely on Swedish data, including daily bank-level lending rates. We find that retail household deposit rates are subject to a lower bound (DLB). Empirically, once the DLB is met, the pass-through to mortgage lending rates and credit volumes is substantially lower and bank equity values decline in response to further policy rate cuts. We construct a banking sector model and use our estimate of the pass-through of negative policy rates to lending rates as an identified moment to parameterize the model and assess the impact of negative policy rates in general equilibrium. Using the theoretical framework, we derive a sufficient statistic for when negative policy rates are expansionary and when they are not.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication package for: Negative Nominal Interest Rates and The Bank Lending Channel

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-01-29

  datasetOpen access

  Package contains replication kit for "Negative Nominal Interest Rates and the Bank Lending Channel", including both replication of the empirical results and the theoretical simulations.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication package for: Negative Nominal Interest Rates and The Bank Lending Channel

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-01-29

  datasetOpen access

  Package contains replication kit for "Negative Nominal Interest Rates and the Bank Lending Channel", including both replication of the empirical results and the theoretical simulations.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James M. Poterba

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  84 shared

• Olivier Blanchard

  Peterson Institute for International Economics

  54 shared

• J. Bradford De Long

  35 shared

• Gauti B. Eggertsson

  33 shared

• J. Bradford DeLong

  28 shared

• Richard Zeckhauser

  Harvard University Press

  26 shared

• David Cutler

  Harvard University

  24 shared

• Ragnar Juelsrud

  Norges Bank

  24 shared

Education

• B.A., Government

  Harvard University

  1975

• M.A., Economics

  Harvard University

  1976

• Ph.D., Economics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1982

Awards & honors

• Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation (1…
• John Bates Clark Medal (1993)