The Burack President's Distinguished Lecture Series hosts two experts in the coming week, spanning topics from economics and the environment to wellbeing and spirituality.

On Monday, Oct. 7, Mary Jo Kreitzer, director of the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota, will discuss "Cultivating Wellbeing in our Lives and Communities." Her lecture will take place at noon in North Lounge, Billings.

Kreitzer will discuss the determinants of wellbeing and highlight strategies that lead to human flourishing. She will also discuss why empowering people and communities to assume more personal responsibility for their health and wellbeing is becoming an economic imperative for the nation.

On Thursday, Oct. 10, Gary D. Libecap, Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Corporate Environmental Management in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will speak on "Addressing Global Environmental Externalities: Transaction Costs Considerations." His lecture will begin at 4 p.m. in the Davis Center's Frank Livak Room.

Libecap is a leading expert on the economics of common pool resources, or goods whose characteristics make it difficult to exclude others from benefiting from them, typically resulting in overuse. Fisheries, grazing land, minerals, water access and climate change are all instances where common pool resource problems are paramount. He is the author of seminal books and papers on the economics of fisheries, oil unitization, mineral rights and water markets.

Libecap has served as president of the International Society for the New Institutional Economics, the Economic History Association and the Western Economics Association, is a recipient of multiple National Science Foundation grants, and is a former editor of the Journal of Economic History. In 2010-11 he was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University.

Both events are free and open to the public, and receptions will follow each.

Information on Kreitzer's talk: (802) 578-7495, cara@lauramanncenter.org

Information on Libecap's talk: (802) 656-3064, econ@uvm.edu

PUBLISHED

10-02-2013
University Communications