Dr. Michael Robert Kremer, Harvard University’s Gates Professor of Developing Societies in the Department of Economics, will deliver the annual Alexander Brody Distinguished Lecture in Economics at Yeshiva University on Tuesday, April 29 at 7:30 p.m.

The event, entitled “Improving Health in the Developing World,” will take place at Weissberg Commons on YU’s Wilf Campus, located at 2495 Amsterdam Avenue, and is open to the public.

Kremer is an American developmental economist whose work focuses on the use of incentives, particularly the design of incentive mechanisms to encourage the development of vaccines in developing countries and the use of randomized trials to evaluate interventions in the social sciences.

He is the creator of “Kremer’s O-Ring Theory of Economic Development,” a well-known economic theory regarding skill complementarities. Kremer is also founder and president of WorldTeach, a Harvard-based organization which places college students and recent graduates as volunteer teachers on summer and yearlong programs in developing countries around the world.

A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and Presidential Faculty Fellowship, Kremer was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a research affiliate at Innovations for Poverty Action, a New Haven, Connecticut-based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems.

Kremer also proposed one of the most convincing explanations for the increase in population growth rates observed prior to the early 1970s and the positive connection between population size and technological progress.

The Professor Alexander Brody Distinguished Service Lecture is presented annually by the YU Economics Department, chaired by Dr. James Kahn, the Henry and Bertha Kressel Professor and Chair of Economics at YU. It is named for Alexander Brody, a professor of economics and history who died in 1968 after a 34-year tenure at YU.