The Frank Knight Lecture is an annual scholarly event named in honor of Cornell's most esteemed Ph.D. student in Economics.  Knight was a pioneer in the study of uncertainty and entrepreneurship, and was one of the most important economists of the 20th century.   This annual lecture is traditionally open to the Economics department faculty, field faculty, and graduate students.

This year's speaker : Ed Glaeser, Harvard University 

Edward L. Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught economic theory and urban economics since 1992. He also leads the Urban Economics Working Group at the National Bureau of Economics Research, co-leads the Cities Programme of the International Growth Centre, and co-edits the Journal of Urban Economics. He has written hundreds of papers on cities, infrastructure and other topics, and written, co-written and co-edited many books including Triumph of the City, Survival of the City (with David Cutler) and Fighting Poverty in the U.S. and Europe: A World of Difference (with Alberto Alesina). He has served as Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Chair of Harvard’s Economics Department. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Econometric Society, and he received the Albert O. Hirschman prize from the Social Science Research Council. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1988 and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1992.

(https://glaeser.scholars.harvard.edu/)