Spring 2026 Events
February 10 | Deirdre McCloskey
"How Growth (Actually) Happened"
Event Location: Oceti Sakowin Ballroom, Memorial Union, 5:30-7:00 p.m., hors d'oeuvres will follow from 7:00-8:00 p.m.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is a distinguished scholar and Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute. She is also a distinguished professor emerita of economics and of history and professor emerita of English and of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After getting her PhD in economics at Harvard, she taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa. She has written 24 books and some 400 academic and popular articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistical theory, feminism, ethics, and law.
McCloskey’s recent books include The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2006); Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2010); Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press, 2016); Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (Yale University Press, 2019); and, with Art Carden, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: The Bourgeois Deal (University of Chicago Press, 2020).
April 21 | Jason Riley
"The Affirmative Action Myth"
Event Location: Louise S. Barry Ballroom in Richard H. Barry Hall, 5:30-7:00 p.m., hors d'oeuvres will follow from 7:00-8:00 p.m.
Jason Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and a commentator for Fox News. Riley’s new book, The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed, is available now. After joining the Journal in 1994, he was named a senior editorial writer in 2000 and a member of the editorial board in 2005. Riley writes opinion pieces on politics, economics, education, immigration, and race. He’s also a frequent public speaker and provides commentary for television and radio news outlets.
Riley is the author of several other books, including Let Them In (2008), which argues for more legal immigration; Please Stop Helping Us (2014), which discusses the track record of government efforts to lift the black underclass; False Black Power? (2017), an assessment of why black political success has not translated into more economic advancement; Maverick, a biography of the economist Thomas Sowell (2021); and The Black Boom (2022), an analysis of black economic progress prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. He also narrated the 2021 documentary film, Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World.
Riley is a recipient of the 2018 Bradley Prize. He previously worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News and holds a B.A. in English from SUNY-Buffalo.
Fridays from 10-11 a.m. in Beckwith Recital Hall
January 23 | Siri Terjesen
“Capitalism vs. Cronyism and the Importance of Understanding the Difference”
Dr. Siri A. Terjesen is Associate Dean, Research & External Relations, founding Executive Director of the Madden Center for Value Creation, and Phil Smith Professor of Entrepreneurship at FAU, and Professor .2 at the Norwegian School of Economics (Norges Handelshøyskole: NHH) in Bergen, Norway.
Dr. Terjesen is an internationally recognized expert in business, higher education and philanthropy, and is amongst the world's top 2% most cited scholars (Clarivate), with over 22,000 citations to her three books and 100+ peer-reviewed articles. She has been PI or co-PI on $12min research grants and gifts over her career.
Dr. Terjesen has published in leading journals such as Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, Leadership Quarterly, and Strategic Management Journal. Her research is featured in media including Bloomberg, U.S. News & World Report, the Times, and CNBC. Dr. Terjesen is current editor of Small Business Economics, Industry & Innovation, and Beta, and an editorial review member of several top journals. Her op-eds have been published in The Hill, Newsweek, Washington Times, Daily Signal, City Journal, Epoch Times, and other outlets.
February 6 | Jason Brennan
“The Morality of Capitalism”
Jason Brennan (Ph.D., 2007, University of Arizona) is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He specializes in politics, philosophy, and economics. He is the editor-in-chief of Philosophy & Public Affairs and an associate editor of Social Philosophy and Policy. He recently completed a $2.1 million project on "Markets, Social Entrepreneurship, and Effective Altruism," funded by the Templeton Foundation. In 2024, he was named one of the best undergraduate business professors by Poets and Quants. In 2022, Brennan received the Provost's Innovation in Teaching Award for his development of the Ethics Project, a student-directed experiential learning project.
He is the author of 20 books. His books have been translated 35 times (including forthcoming translations), into Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish, German, Italian, Korean, Greek, Polish, Persian, Mongolian, Georgian, Ukrainian, Czech, and Swedish. Gegen Demokratie (Ullstein, 2017), the German translation of Against Democracy, was a Der Spiegel bestseller.
He has published over 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals, over 30 peer-reviewed chapters in edited anthologies, and over 50 articles for popular and trade audiences.
Immigration
March 20 | Delia Furtado
“Immigration and Workforce”
Delia Furtado is a Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. Since earning her Ph.D. in Economics from Brown University, she has published extensively in the field of immigration in journals such as the Journal of Human Resources, American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings), European Economic Review, and Demography. She is a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) as well as the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM).
Interested in the ways in which social interactions affect behaviors, Delia Furtado has studied topics that range from the causes and consequences of immigrant intermarriage to the role of culture in explaining divorce rates. She has also examined how low-skilled immigration impacts fertility and labor supply decisions of high skilled natives and the role of work norms and networks in explaining disability insurance take-up among immigrants. She has some work examining how restrictions on the number of H-1B visas affect career choices of international students studying in the United States. She also has several projects considering how immigrants help natives care for an aging population, both in nursing homes and in their own homes.
March 27 | Stephen Terry
“Immigration, Innovation, and Wages ”
Stephen Terry is a macroeconomist who studies firm investment, in particular the impact of micro-level frictions or mechanisms on long-term growth and business cycles. Stephen received his PhD in economics from Stanford University in 2015, is affiliated with the NBER, and previously served as an assistant professor at Boston University.
Laws, Policies, and Regulations Impacting Opportunity and Flourishing
April 17 | Shishir Shakya
“State-Level Policies and Healthcare”
Shishir is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, Walker College of Business, Appalachian State University. He is also a Research Fellow of the Knee Center for the Study of Occupational Regulation at West Virginia University.
He is an applied economist specializing in healthcare provider labor, licensing, and regulation markets. He is passionate about finding solutions that improve healthcare access and quality at reduced costs.
He uses various applied econometric, spatial, and policy evaluation techniques and supplement my empirical knowledge with the practice of technology-driven methods such as data-scrapping, big data, predictive, and causal machine learning approaches.
He has published in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals, including the World Development, Annals of Regional Science, Energy Economics, Contemporary Economic Policy, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Spatial Economic Analysis, Applied Economics Letters, Journal of Labor Research, and others.
He teaches Business and Economic Statistics II and Timeseries Forecasting in Fall 2023. Previously, I have taught Regional Economics, Economic Analysis of Big Data, Principles of Economics, Macroeconomics, Managerial Economics, Business Data Visualization, and Elementary Business & Economic Statistics.
May 8 | Ed Timmons
“Occupational Licensing and Opportunity”
Edward J. Timmons, PhD, is Vice President of Policy at the Archbridge Institute. He leads the institute’s economic policy strategy, identifying focus areas and disseminating work to key stakeholders and policymakers. His own research focuses on labor economics and regulatory policy; he is regularly asked to provide expert testimony to U.S. states on occupational licensing reform and the practice authority of nurse practitioners. His work has been cited in top-tier scholarly journals, including The Journal of Law & Economics, The Journal of Regulatory Economics, The Journal of Labor Research, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Health Policy, and Health Economics. In addition, he has authored more than 100 articles for media publications, appearing in U.S. News & World Report, National Review, The Hill, Harvard Business Review, The Washington Examiner, and dozens of regional outlets. His research is frequently cited by the popular press and has been featured by the Federal Trade Commission, the Obama White House, and in a U.S. Senate hearing entitled “License to Compete: Occupational Licensing and the State Action Doctrine.” He publishes a weekly newsletter on Substack with the latest research and policy insights surrounding occupational licensing.
Dr. Timmons received his Ph.D. in economics from Lehigh University and his B.A. in economics and actuarial science from Lebanon Valley College. He was the founding director of the Knee Regulatory Research Center and is currently an affiliate at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Research and Innovations at Columbia University’s School of Nursing and a regulatory policy analyst at the Bluegrass Institute. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his wife and two sons, traveling, cooking, and closely following his beloved New Orleans Saints.