Rosen’s contributions to be honored with memorial, conference

The University will remember the late Sherwin Rosen, a distinguished economist, with a memorial service at 3:30 p.m. Friday, May 18, in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, and a conference in his honor, beginning at 9 a.m. Saturday, May 19, in the third-floor lecture room in Swift Hall.

Speakers at the memorial service will be Gary Becker, Professor in Economics and Sociology; Edward Lazear, Stanford University; Derek Neal, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Michelle Rosen, Rosen’s niece; and Robert Willis, University of Michigan.

A reception will be held following the service in Ida Noyes Hall.

Rosen, a leading labor economist and president of the American Economics Association, died Saturday, March 17, at the University’s Bernard Mitchell Hospital. He was 62.

Rosen, the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, was a micro-economist with special interests in industrial organization and labor economics. His research included important theoretical and empirical work that helped economists understand how a wide variety of different forces influence such items as the prices of homes and the salaries of celebrities.

The conference will celebrate Rosen’s contributions to economics and examine topics familiar to his work. It will open with a session on human capital, income distribution and markets.

Other topics will include lectures on hedonics and a concluding session titled Tournaments, Superstars and Hierarchies.

Participating University faculty members from the Department of Economics are Becker; Michael Greenstone, Assistant Professor in Economics; James Heckman, the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics; Robert Lucas, the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor in Economics; and Casey Mulligan, Associate Professor in Economics.

University economists in the Graduate School of Business who will participate in the conference are Dennis Carlton, Professor of Economics in the GSB; Steven Davis, Professor of Economics in the GSB; Kevin Murphy, the George Pratt Shultz Professor of Economics and Industrial Relations in the GSB; Richard Thaler, the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Behavioral Sciences and Economics in the GSB; and Robert Topel, the Isidore Brown & Gladys J. Brown Professor of Urban and Labor Economics in the GSB.

Raaj Sah, Professor in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, also is a conference participant.

Scholars from across the country and around the world also will participate in the Rosen conference, including Orley Asenfelter, Princeton University; Stanley Engerman, University of Rochester; Reuben Gronau, Hebrew University; Robert Hall, Stanford University; Lazear; and Yoram Weiss, University of Tel Aviv.

Additional presenters and discussants are William Chan, Pascal Courty, Li Hao, Glenn MacDonald, Derek Neal, Lars Nesheim, Walter Oi, Thomas Sargent and Bruce Weinberg.