Prof. Oded Galor, Ph.D.

Roots of Growth and Inequality

During his visit to Munich, Oded Galor will deliver three CES Lectures on Roots of Growth and Inequality in the Wealth of Nations, which will examine the evolution of societies across human history, uncovering the universal forces that have shaped humanity’s journey and driven the dramatic transformation of living standards over the past two centuries. The lectures will shed light on the role of deeply rooted factors – institutions, culture, geography, and human diversity – in the emergence of disparities in the wealth of nations.

He will also lecture on the Roots of Inequality in the Hahn Möhring Seminar. The lecture will advance the hypothesis and establish empirically that in a market economy, where income differentials reflect variations in productive traits, a significant share of cross-societal differences in inequality reflects enduring variation in diversity within societies, rooted in the prehistoric Out-of-Africa migration. Populations whose ancestors originated closer to East Africa tend to exhibit greater dispersion in productive traits – education, ability, and labor supply – mediating the relationship between diversity and inequality.

Oded Galor is the Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University and the founder of Unified Growth Theory. He has contributed to the understanding of the process of development over the entire course of human history and the role of deep-rooted factors in the transition from stagnation to growth and in the emergence of the vast inequality in the wealth of nations. He has contributed to the exploration of the impact of inequality on the process of development, the interaction between cultural adaptation and economic development, and the impact of population diversity on comparative economic development.

Oded Galor has been awarded Doctorate Honoris Causa from Nicolaus Copernicus University, Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), UC Louvain, and Poznań University of Economics & Business. He is an elected Foreign Member of Academia Europaea and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He is also a Research Fellow of CEPR and IZA, a Research Associate of the NBER and CESifo, a former Sackler Fellow at Tel-Aviv University, and a Fellow of the Economics Department at the Hebrew University. In addition, he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Economic Growth, Editor of the Journal of Population Economics, and Co-Editor of Macroeconomic Dynamics.