I am a 1987 graduate of the LSE.  In less than two months, I return to the LSE to see my friends there and to give several lectures. One will be a public lecture  where I discuss the big themes of my China research.  Most of this research is joint with Siqi Zheng of Tsinghua.   One of my China pollution papers, which will soon be published in AEJ, is joint with Pei Li and Daxuan Zhou.

My year at the LSE (1986 to 1987) played a pivotal role in my early training.   From 1984 to 1986, I attended a liberal arts college.  There were no graduate students at my college.  Relatively few of the faculty were active researchers. Instead, these smart faculty taught and held office hours and served on campus administrative committees.   Few of my classmates were intellectual nerds who aspired to become professors.   In this setting, I became a cocky guy and a bit of "know it all".   At the LSE, I met students who had a better training than me and who were smarter than me.  The LSE attracts students from all over Europe and the Middle East and these individuals viewed life much differently than a dude from the suburbs of New York City.   Together, this was an eye opener.   By the end of my year at LSE, I had a much better sense of what pro economists really do and where at that moment I stood in the "ability" distribution.  I returned to my college for my senior year better trained and aware of the objective reality.  My very good exam grades at LSE must have played a key role in helping me to get admitted to Ph.D. programs.  This was my start and I've tried to make the most of the opportunity.

When I return to LSE as a 49 year old guy (and folks know that I'm a strange public speaker with a very distinctive style that most professors would never dare to use), I hope that there will be some 20 year old in the audience who is interested in the substance of my remarks and is slightly inspired to learn that economics continues to be a fascinating subject offering great questions, now better data, and very good job prospects for those who demonstrate the potential to push the frontier forward.