Many developing countries suffer from poorly performing educational systems that fail to equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary to participate productively in the modern economy. How can educational outcomes be improved? To address this question, Esther Duflo draws on path-breaking recent research on school learning techniques in rural India that bridges economics with disciplines such as psychology and cognitive science. Panellists Sir Richard Peto, one of the world’s most influential health statisticians and an expert on large RCTs, and Rachel Glennester, chief economist of DFID, analyse and comment on the research drawing on their own knowledge and experience of a variety of related policy interventions.

Professor Ann Langley, Chair in Strategic Management in Pluralistic Settings, HEC Montréal discusses her research work. Process thinkers and scholars understand organizing and managing in terms of movement, activity and flow rather than in terms of success factors, best practices and static relationships between inputs and outcomes: in other words, they are interested in “how” questions, rather than “what” questions, and they take time and temporality to be central. However, there are a variety of ways of considering what a process perspective might mean, each involving different assumptions and each demanding different approaches to research and intervention. In this lecture, the speaker will examine four different modes of thinking about process (as development; as narrative; as activity; and as withness) and consider their implications for managing and researching organizations.

The Sanjaya Lall Memorial Trust held a panel discussion to welcome Sanjaya Lall Visiting Fellow Professor Kenneith Rogoff, Harvard University. Other panellists were Martin Wolf CBE of the Financial Times and Professor John Muellbauer of Oxford University.

Professor Avinash Dixit, the Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professor 2016, leads a panel discussion reviewing and explaining the rapid growth of emerging market multinationals over the last three decades. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Larry Hirschhorn, Principal CFAR, gives the 2015 Richard Normann Memorial lecture.

Professor Abhijit Banerjee (Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professor) delivers the 2015 Sajaya Lall Lecture. Professor Abhijit Banerjee, Ford International Professor of Economics at MIT, will be joining the Department of Economics as the Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professor for Trinity Term 2015. Professor Banerjee is a founding director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and in 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory. He is the author of a large number of articles and three books, including Poor Economics (www.pooreconomics.com) which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year in 2011.

Professor Paul Krugman, Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professor, leads a panel discussion on whether the world's economy is facing 'secular stagnation' 5 years after the credit crunch. Professor Paul Krugman, Lord Adair Turner and Lord Robert Skidelsky discuss the state of the global economy. The discussion is prompted by a talk on 'Secular Stagnation' by Professor Paul Krugman, Sanjaya Lall Visiting Professor, Trinity Term 2014, and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.