2026 Stone Lecture in Economic Inequality: Cecilia Rouse

The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Lecture in Economic Inequality

Where’s the Squeeze? Using Economic Data to Understand the Affordability Crisis

The 2026 Stone Lecture in Economic Inequality will be delivered by economist Cecilia Rouse on Thursday, October 22, at 6:00 PM in the Harvard Kennedy School's JFK Jr. Forum. Rouse served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2021 to 2023, and is currently the president of the Brookings Institution. The 2026 Stone Lecture will be moderated by Claudia Goldin, the Samuel W. Morris University Professor, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics, and the Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts & Sciences at Harvard University. The Stone Lecture is designed to bring greater awareness to wealth concentration and the broader problems of inequality. Previous Stone Lectures were delivered by Thomas Piketty (2018), Emmanuel Saez (2019), Joseph Stiglitz (2022), Daron Acemoglu (2024), and Lina Khan (2025).

Cecilia Elena Rouse is the president of the Brookings Institution. From 2021 to 2023, she served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), the first Black American to fill that role in the CEA’s 75-year history. Confirmed with 95 votes in the U.S. Senate, she served as CEA Chair while on public service leave from Princeton University, where she joined the faculty in 1992. While at Princeton, she also served as dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs from 2012 to 2021. She is the University’s Katzman-Ernst Professor in Economics and Education and a professor of economics and public affairs. A labor economist with a focus on the economics of education, Rouse is the founding director of the Princeton Education Research Section and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Education. She served as senior editor of The Future of Children, a policy journal published by Princeton and the Brookings Institution, co-editor of the Journal of Labor Economics, and on the editorial boards of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and other journals. She previously served on the boards of the Council of Foreign Relations, MDRC, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the University of Rhode Island, and was an independent director of the T. Rowe Price Funds. Rouse’s time as CEA chair was her third White House tour of duty. She served as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2011, and as Special Assistant to the President at the National Economic council from 1998 to 1999. Rouse earned both her doctoral degree in economics and her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.

Claudia Goldin is the Samuel W. Morris University Professor and the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She also holds the Lee and Ezpeleta Professorship of Arts & Sciences at Harvard University. She was the director of the NBER’s Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017 and is currently a co-director of the NBER’s Gender in the Economy group. Goldin was awarded the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes.” An economic historian and a labor economist, Goldin’s research covers a wide range of topics, including the female labor force, the gender gap in earnings, income inequality, technological change, education, and immigration. Most of her research interprets the present through the lens of the past and explores the origins of current issues of concern. Her most recent book is Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity (Princeton University Press, 2021), which has been translated into 15 languages. She is currently writing Why Women Won, an economic history of women’s rights in the U.S. She is the author and editor of several books, among them Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (Oxford 1990), The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy (with G. Libecap; University of Chicago Press 1994), The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (with M. Bordo and E. White; University of Chicago Press 1998), Corruption and Reform: Lesson’s from America’s Economic History (with E. Glaeser; Chicago 2006), and Women Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages (with L. Katz; Chicago 2018). Her book The Race between Education and Technology (with L. Katz; Belknap Press, 2008, 2010) was the winner of the 2008 R.R. Hawkins Award for the most outstanding scholarly work in all disciplines of the arts and sciences.