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On May 11, the Richmond Fed will introduce the Goodfriend Memorial Lecture during its Collaboration of Research Economists (CORE) Week event. The new lecture series honors the legacy of Marvin Goodfriend, longtime Richmond Fed economist, research director and senior policy advisor who died in 2019, by inviting a prominent economist in the field to share their research.

Hugo Hopenhayn, professor of economics at UCLA, Guggenheim Fellow and long-term Richmond Fed research consultant, will deliver the inaugural Goodfriend Lecture with a presentation of his paper titled “Knowledge Creation and Diffusion with Limited Appropriation,” which was co-authored with Liyan Shi. The paper discusses how intellectual property rights must trade off incentives for innovation and knowledge diffusion and considers the optimal assignment of property rights as a Ramsey problem in a dynamic model, where knowledge diffusion takes place under random matching.

First introduced in 2021, the Richmond Fed’s Collaboration of Research Economists (CORE) model combines frontier research and an innovative delivery method to advance collaboration within the economics profession. The model consists of eight CORE Weeks per year during which visiting economists from a range of disciplines join Richmond Fed economists for seminars, conferences, and formal and informal networking and collaboration aimed at advancing economic research.

“As an initiative intended to foster collaboration between the best and brightest in economic research, there seems to be no more fitting venue for the Goodfriend Lecture than CORE Week,” said Kartik Athreya, executive vice president and research director for the Richmond Fed. “Marvin’s legacy will live on at the Richmond Fed and in the economics world for generations, and we are grateful to be able to further honor his work and memory in this way.”

Hopenhayn will deliver the Goodfriend Lecture as part of the Networks, Innovation and Productivity Conference, which he organized. One of two conferences of its kind planned for CORE Weeks in 2023, the two-day event will feature research from leading scholars from the University of Chicago, Cornell, Princeton, UCLA, USC, Yale and the Atlanta Fed on how the efficiency of production is shaped by innovation and the way firms interact with each other, including spatial production networks, firm-to-firm trade and talent.

Premier CORE Week conference events like the Networks, Innovation and Productivity Conference take place two to three times per year and are organized in partnership with a leading scholar or entity in the economics field. Top scholars from across the United States and abroad are invited to attend and share research on topics related to policy, banking and finance, and microeconomics.

Honoring Marvin Goodfriend

The Goodfriend Memorial Lecture is the latest Richmond Fed effort to honor the life, work and legacy of Marvin Goodfriend, who served as research director, senior policy advisor and economist during his 27-year tenure at the Richmond Fed from 1978 until his retirement in 2005. Previous tributes include the Marvin S. Goodfriend Conference, which took place during CORE Week in May 2022, as well as “Essays in Honor of Marvin Goodfriend: Economist and Central Banker,” published in the same year.

Visit the Honoring Marvin Goodfriend page to learn more about Goodfriend through his research and policy papers, essays reflecting on his life and work and personal reflections from his former colleagues.