Professor James J. Heckman, Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, was invited by the Institute for Economic and Social Research (IESR) of Jinan University and the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs to visit Jinan University on March 14th 2016.

Heckman’s Lecture: Family education is the key of early education and education investment should be emphasized in poverty relief policy

Prof. Heckman delivered a lecture on “Creating and Measuring Capabilities” for hundreds of teachers and students in the International Hall in Jinan University. Prof. Heckman shared his opinions on some important research questions regarding the human development from the perspective of economics. Prof. Heckman pointed out that early education is of great significance, especially for children at the age before five, because they are of high plasticity and early education can lay foundation for their future learning skills. In early education, family education comes first and it plays a very important role in the formation of personal capabilities. Prof. Heckman expanded the topic to poverty relief policy, he suggested that instead of simply redistributing income, long-term poverty relief policy should focus on education investment, especially the investment on children from poor families. If the society could continuously invest on the education for children from poor families, their core capability would be improved significantly, which will consequently eliminate the polarization of wealth.

Face to Face with Nobel Laureate

The lecture was then followed by the “Face to Face with the Nobel Laureate”. Prof. Heckman interacted with six student representatives from various universities in Guangdong province, they are Li Ce from Sun Yat-sen University, Xu Hongming from South China Normal University, Zhang Shuteng from South China Agricultural University, Xie Yuhan, Zou Han and Wu Yi from Jinan University.

Prof. Heckman visits IESR

In the afternoon, Prof. Heckman visited IESR of Jinan University and had a meeting with Prof. Shuaizhang Feng, the dean of IESR. Prof. Feng introduced the development plan of IESR and his recent research projects in details, he also introduced the large-scale databases that IESR is aiming to build up, which mainly focus on the research areas of labor market, employment, rural-urban migration and children and teenage development. Lastly, Prof. Heckman and Prof. Feng had an in-depth discussion on the future cooperation.