Back to News

Melissa Dell to Deliver the 2024-2025 Raben Lecture on Oct. 7

Melissa Dell

Melissa Dell, the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University, will deliver the John R. Raben/Sullivan & Cromwell Fellowship Lecture titled “The Dynamics of Economic Organization: Persistence and Change” on Oct. 7 at 4:30 p.m. at Yale Law School.

Dell’s research focuses on economic growth and political economy. She has examined the factors leading to the persistence of poverty and prosperity in the long run, the effects of trade-induced job loss on crime, the impacts of U.S. foreign intervention, and the influence of weather upon economic growth. She has also honed methods of curating social science data at scale via deep learning, which enables her to research questions requiring the digitization of historical sources that would be impractical to handle manually. Dell has made many of her methods available to the public in the form of the open-source Layout Parser. 

Dell received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2020, awarded annually to an American economist under 40 deemed to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. She was named one of the decade’s eight best young economists by The Economist in 2018 and named by the International Monetary Fund as the youngest of 25 economists under 45 shaping thought about the global economy in 2014. Dell is currently a senior scholar at the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Dell received an A.B. from Harvard, an M.Phil. from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. from MIT; all in economics. 

The lecture is open to the Yale community. To attend, register by 12:00 p.m. ET on Monday, Oct. 7.

A series of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law, the John R. Raben/Sullivan & Cromwell Fellowship Lecture honors the memory of John R. Raben ’39. A partner of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, Raben was counsel to investment banking and accounting firms and associations, including the Financial Accounting Standards Board, and counsel to the industry task force that helped draft the Securities Investor Protection Corporation legislation.

Established in 1999, the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law has a wide-ranging objective to enhance the quality of students’ educational experience and of faculty research in the business law area by increasing exposure to and engagement with contemporary business law issues.