Harvard Economist to Discuss Improvement of Health and Education in the Developing World

12:00AM / Monday, October 16, 2006Print Story | Email Story

Harvard University Professor of Economics Michael Kremer will deliver the Biannual Henry George Lecture at Williams College. His talk on "Improving Health and Education in the Developing World" will be held Monday, October 16, at 8 p.m., in The Science Center's Wege Auditorium. Kremer is the Gates Professor of Developing Countries at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is co-chair and co-founder of The Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development and a consultant to the Development Economics Research Group of The World Bank. Kremer has won numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, and most recently the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for Best Paper in Health Economics in 2005 by the International Health Economics Association and the Association of American Publishers Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Medical Science for his book "Strong Medicine: Creating Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected Diseases," in 2004. Recent work has focused on issues of Advance Market Commitments for Vaccines against Neglected Diseases: Estimating Costs and Effectiveness, The Illusion of Sustainability, and Long-Term Educational Consequences of Secondary School Vouchers: Evidence from Administrative Records in Columbia. In his most recent paper, Kremer discusses how "an advance market vaccine commitment may be sufficient to stimulate substantial research towards a desired vaccine, and from a public health perspective still be extremely cost effective." According to him, "the larger the commitment, the more biopharmaceutical firms will enter the search for a vaccine, and the faster a vaccine is likely to be developed." He elaborates on this topic in Creating Markets for Vaccines. "Advance purchase commitments for vaccines for diseases concentrated in poor areas," writes Kremer, "have considerable appeal across the ideological spectrum as a market-oriented mechanism that brings the resources of the private sector to address the health needs of the world's poorest countries." Kremer received his A.B. in social studies from Harvard College and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

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Williamstown Board Hears Concerns About 'Hometown Heroes' Banners

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:32AM / Wednesday, September 16, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Kurt Durocher told the Williamstown Select Board that he had received nothing but positive feedback from the North County communities where he proposed participation in the Hometown Heroes banner program.

Then Williamstown residents started to weigh in.

Durocher was before the board Monday evening to seek its blessing to put banners recognizing living and deceased military veterans on utility poles in Williamstown, an initiative that has been embraced in all but one of the other municipalities in the district where he serves as Veterans' Service Officer.

"The only negative I've had right now, and it's not really negative, [the Town of ] Florida doesn't want banners to go on Route 2, the Mohawk Trail, for safety reasons, understandably," Durocher said. "So we're trying to figure out an alternate way to make that work in Florida."

By and large, though, the reception to the program has been encouraging, Durocher said.

"I'll use Adams as an example," he said. "They've had a program for many, many years, but it's only for [military personnel] killed in action. Now that I've been allowed to take over that program … there's been a huge outpouring of support, because now we get living veterans on the poles as well.

"The only negative I've had is certain people want their banners in certain locations. So what we did in North Adams is we just did a random draw. I can't please everybody. I've got people who want a banner in a certain location, but three other people want that same location.It was a straight random draw for them."

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