In Honor of Lawrence H. Summers, Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

L awrence Henry Summers is the 1993 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, an award presented by the American Economic Association every other year to an outstanding economist under the age of forty. Larry is an extraordinary research economist, as well as an active participant in economic policymaking, and to some degree a political figure. He served as a Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers (1981-82), Chief Economist of the World Bank (1989-91), and is currently the Under-Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Treasury. This paper summarizes Larry's important research contributions.' The next four sections describe his work in the four fields of economics that were identified in the Clark Medal citation: public finance, labor economics, financial economics, and macroeconomics.2 Each section describes his substantive research contributions, and discusses novel aspects of his research strategy. The sheer quantity of Larry's published work has forced me to limit this survey to a fraction of his research, and I apologize at the outset to Larry, and his coauthors, for oversights or errors of omission. As is typical of papers of this