The Cambridge-INET institute in collaboration with Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group (HCEO) held its 2014 Summer School at the University of Cambridge from June 16–June 20, 2014. The theme of the Summer School is Social Economics. The organizers of the Summer School were Professor Steven N. Durlauf and Professor Sanjeev Goyal.

Economic activity takes place at the intersection of social structure and markets.  This interaction between society and the market is crucial for an understanding of persistent social and economic inequality, the role of culture and identity, the place of institutions in economic development, and the emerging world of on-line social media.

This Summer School brought together internationally leading authorities to lecture on Social Economics and provided state-of-the-art overviews of different aspects of the subject.

We provided an intensive one-week experience that teaches the tools needed to study questions in social economics and also to communicate a sense of the research frontier in this area.  The teaching of tools is of particular importance as the theoretical and empirical study of questions in this field call forth concepts drawn from mathematics and also from the other social and information sciences. The Summer School intended to break down barriers between theoretical, econometric, and empirical work.

Lecturers and Lecture Titles

  • Lawrence Blume, (Cornell University),"Economic Models and Network Science"
  • Steven Durlauf, (University of Wisconsin–Madison), "Intergenerational Mobility"
  • Armin Falk, (Universität Bonn), "Personality and Morality"
  • Sanjeev Goyal, (University of Cambridge), "Networks and Markets"
  • Shachar Kariv, (University of California, Berkeley), "Distributional Preferences"
  • Rachel Kranton, (Duke University), "Identity and Inequality"
  • Kaivan Munshi, (University of Cambridge), "Networks and Mis-allocation"

Lecturers made formal presentations, which were supplemented with paper presentations and poster sessions by students.