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Robert Manduca

Racial and economic disparities intertwined, study shows

October 25, 2018
Harvard Gazette | By many measures, the U.S. has made important strides when it comes to Civil Rights: The racial gaps in educational achievement, life expectancy, and wages, though still considerable, have all narrowed measurably in the past 50 years. Yet in one marker of fundamental importance — family income — disparities between black and white have remained virtually unchanged since 1968.


In a study published in Sociological Science, Robert Manduca, PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy, argues that a major reason that economic disparities between the races remain so large is rising income inequality nationwide.

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Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy Receives $2.5 Million Gift

Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy Receives $2.5 Million Gift

March 27, 2018
Harvard Kennedy School | Harvard Kennedy School has received a $2.5 million gift from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation to support new and ongoing work to address wealth concentration and the broader problems of inequality. The gift supports the research and outreach efforts at the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, which serves as a nexus for work on inequality across the university. The program brings together Harvard faculty and PhD students from the social sciences who are exploring issues such as income inequality and wealth concentration, poverty and justice, opportunity and intergenerational mobility, and inequalities of race and place. Read more »
Harvard Kennedy School campus

HKS Receives $2.5 Million for Economic Inequality Research

March 27, 2018

The Harvard Crimson  | The gift will support the work of over 40 Harvard doctoral students in the social sciences who will be known as Stone PhD Scholars in Inequality and Wealth Concentration. The donation also establishes the Stone Senior Scholars program—an initiative which will invite 12 leading scholars of inequality to give lectures and coordinate events about economic opportunity and income inequality—and the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Lecture, a series of public lectures around economic inequality across the world. French economist Thomas Piketty will deliver the first lecture of the Stone series Friday at the Kennedy School’s JFK Forum.

The Rise of the 1 Percent Negates Any Progress on the Racial Income Gap

The Rise of the 1 Percent Negates Any Progress on the Racial Income Gap

March 12, 2018

Pacific Standard | Research by Robert Manduca, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy, shows how the rise in income inequality in the top few percentiles of the distribution helps explain why, more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act, black-white family income disparities in the U.S remain almost exactly the same as they were in 1968. The study, "Income Inequality and the Persistence of Racial Economic Disparities," is now out in Sociological Science.
View the research

Claudia Goldin

Wielding Data, Women Force a Reckoning Over Bias in the Economics Field

January 10, 2018
The New York Times | Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard, pointed to a recent study by Inequality & Social Policy doctoral fellow Heather Sarsons that found that women get significantly less credit than men when they co-write papers with them, as reflected in the way the paper affects their chances of receiving tenure. Heather Sarsons is a PhD candidate in Economics at Harvard.
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Inefficient equilibrium: Women and economics

Inefficient equilibrium: Women and economics

December 19, 2017
The Economist | An analysis of women's underrepresentation in economics and what the research tells us. Discusses research of Heather Sarsons, a PhD candidate in Economics, who investigated gender differences in who gets credit for jointly-authored work. Also notes steps that David Laibson, as chair of the Harvard economics department, has taken to address such issues as implicit bias in faculty search and promotion committees.
Nathan Wilmers

Reproducing Inequality

August 29, 2017
Nature | Discusses new study by Nathan Wilmers, PhD candidate in Sociology, recently published in the American Journal of Sociology: "Does Consumer Demand Reproduce Inequality? High-Income Consumers, Vertical Differentiation, and the Wage Structure."
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Gabrielle Malina

Your Rabbi? Probably a Democrat. Your Baptist Pastor? Probably a Republican. Your Priest? Who Knows.

June 12, 2017
The New York Times | Delves into a new dataset by Yale political scientist Eitan Hersh and Harvard's Gabrielle Malina, a PhD candidate in Government & Social Policy, "the largest compilation of American religious leaders ever assembled," the Times reports. The data reveal an American clergy sharply divided along political lines, even more so than congregants in their denomination.
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'After Piketty' released today

'After Piketty' released today

May 8, 2017

Harvard University Press | Ellora Derenoncourt, Ph.D. candidate in Economics, has authored a chapter in After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, released today by Harvard University Press. Derenoncourt's contribution "addresses the deep historical and institutional origins of [global] wealth inequality, which she argues may be driven by what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson identify as 'extractive' versus 'inclusive' institutions."

The 688-page volume, edited by Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, brings together published reviews by Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Robert Solow and newly-commissioned essays by Suresh Naidu, Laura Tyson, Michael Spence, Heather Boushey, Branko Milanovic, and many others. Emmanuel Saez lays out an agenda for future research on inequality, while a variety of essays examine the book's implications for the social sciences more broadly. Harvard Inequality & Social Policy alumna Elisabeth Jacobs (PhD '08), now senior director of research and a senior fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, probes the political dimension in her contribution, "Everywhere and Nowhere: Politics in Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Piketty replies in a substantial concluding chapter.