Lunchtime Seminar - the work of the late Kenneth Arrow

Abstract: This talk will provide an overview of some of the most important intellectual contributions of the late Kenneth Arrow. It will include his celebrated Impossibility Theorem and the First Welfare Theorem, but also his pioneering of what became information economics, contract theory, and organizational economics.

About the Speaker:

Richard Holden is Professor of Economics at UNSW Australia Business School and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow from 2013-2017. He is also academic co-lead of the UNSW Grand Challenge on Inequality.

Prior to that he was on the faculty at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a PhD from Harvard University in 2006, where he was a Frank Knox Scholar.

His research focuses on contract theory, organizational economics, law and economics, and political economy. He has written on topics including: network capital, political districting, the boundary of the firm, incentives in organizations, mechanism design, and voting rules.

Professor Holden has published in top general interest journals such as the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

He is currently editor of the Journal of Law and Economics, and is the founding director of the Herbert Smith Freehills Inititative on Law & Economics at UNSW.

He has been a Visiting Professor of Economics at  the MIT Department of Economics and the MIT Sloan School of Management,  Visiting Professor of Economics at the Harvard Economics Department, and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

His research has been featured in press articles in such outlets as: The New York Times, The Financial Times, the New Republic, and the Daily Kos.

Professor Holden appears regularly on PVO News Day on Sky News and writes for The Australian Financial Review. He also writes a weekly column analyzing global economic data called Vital Signs for The Conversation.