On April 22, 2011, the inaugural speech of Chen Daisun Memorial Lecture in Economics took place in the auditorium of Tsinghua SEM. The first speaker invited was Eric Maskin, 2007 Nobel Laureate in Economics.

The lecture series were initiated as a celebration for the centenary celebration of Tsinghua University. It was named after economist CHEN Daisun, Chair of Tsinghua University Department of Economics, predecessor of Tsinghua SEM, from 1928 to 1952. He has been widely remembered as father of modern economics education in China.

“This memorial lecture would be the highest honor in our school for an academic speech delivered publicly to the faculty and students,” said Dean QIAN Yingyi. “We believe that this is a good way to mark the centennial because it will have a lasting impact.”

Eric Maskin

The inaugural speaker Eric Maskin is now the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is also an Honorary Professor of Tsinghua SEM. The topic of his speech was “Financial Crisis: Why They Occur and What to Do about Them.”

In the speech, Maskin reflected on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. According to him, large externalities in the financial market are an underlying reason for the crisis. In past crises, the specific causal factors and occasions have been different, but they have all been caused by this flaw in the financial mechanism. The deeper causes for financial crisis can hardly be eradicated. People can only try to alleviate the influence by effective supervision and control. However, since changes and innovations in the market too often outrun the development of legislation, the threat of crisis will always be part of finance activities.

Dean QIAN Yingyi (left) and Professor BAI Chong-en (right) with Eric Maskin, who was their Ph.D. advisor at Harvard

Opening Remarks at the Inaugural Chen Daisun Memorial Lecture in Economics

by Dean QIAN Yingyi

April 22, 2011

Dear faculty and students,

We are in the week of celebrating Tsinghua’s first centennial.On this occasion, the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University decided to launch “Chen Daisun Memorial Lecture in Economics” to mark Tsinghua centennial, as well as the 85th year of the founding of the Department of Economics at Tsinghua, and to remember Chen Daisun, the long time chairman of the department.As you may know, many economics departments in the world have such “named” lectures. This memorial lecture would be the highest honor in our school for an academic speech delivered publicly to the faculty and students. We believe that this is a good way to mark the centennial because it will have a lasting impact.

This lecture is named after Professor Chen Daisun.Professor Chen was born in 1900.He graduated from Tsinghua College in 1920.He then received his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1922 and went to Harvard and received his PhD in Economics in 1926.His contemporaries at Harvard’s economics department included Bertil Ohlin whose name later appeared in the Heckscher-Ohlin model of international trade, and Edward Chamberlin, who is known for his monopolistic competition theory.Dr. Chen returned to China in 1928 and became professor of economics and chair of the economics department at Tsinghua in 1928 until 1952, when the economics department was moved to other universities.He died in 1997 at age of 97.

Professor Chen is widely considered as the father of China’s modern economics education.Under his leadership, the economics department at Tsinghua was developed into one of the best in China at the time.It enrolled most students (about 20%) among all undergraduate programs at Tsinghua during his time.To honor him, Tsinghua University erected a statue of his outside this auditorium and inside this building.

Today, we are extremely honored to have Professor Eric Maskin to deliver the inaugural Chen Daisun Memorial Lecture in Economics.Eric was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics, together with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson for “having laid down the foundations of mechanism design theory.”Eric received his PhD from Harvard University in 1976, exactly fifty years after Professor Chen Daisun received his from Harvard.After he earned his doctorate, Eric went to the University of Cambridge in 1976 where he was a research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. He taught at MIT from 1977–1984 and at Harvard from 1985-2000.Since 2000, he is the Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.Eric Maskin is also an honorary Professor of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University.

I was very lucky to have Eric as my PhD thesis advisor at Harvard in the 1980s.More than that, Eric was also PhD advisor of Professors Bai Chong-En and Li Daokui, both of them are on our faculty, as well as Professor Xu Chenggang, whos is a Special-Term Professor at our school.In retrospect, my time at Harvard as a graduate student, especially as a student of Eric, is the most memorable time period in my life.It changed my life.

More than twenty years later, today I, as the dean of the School of Economics and Management, have the honor to invite Eric to Tsinghua during the centennial celebration.Please join me in welcoming Professor Eric Maskin to deliver the inaugural Chen Daisun Memorial Lecture in Economics.