Spring 2017

Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus, Harvard University. In conversation with David T. Ellwood, Director, Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, and Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy...

Robert J. Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University. The literature on mass incarceration and the effects of a criminal record on later outcomes is largely disconnected from research on crime and the life course. This...

Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Henry Lee Professor of Economics, Harvard University. As part of an ongoing research narrative using the tools of economics to understand and solve inequality in America, Dr. Fryer will discuss unpublished results from a recent study...

David Autor, Ford Professor of Economics, MIT. The structure of marriage and child-rearing in U.S. households has undergone two marked shifts in the last three decades: a steep decline in the prevalence of marriage among young adults, and a sharp rise in...

Carol S. Steiker, Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. Poverty and crime intersect in many unfortunate ways, and it has become common to refer to “the criminalization of poverty” to describe a range of pathologies in the criminal...

Michèle Lamont, Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, and Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Harvard University. Building on her recent book Getting Respect: Stigma and Discrimination in the United States...

Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor, Harvard University. About the speaker Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She is a political...

Mario Luis Small, Grafstein Family Professor of Sociology, Harvard University. In the 1990s, researchers came to understand poor urban neighborhoods as blighted, depopulated areas, based on important fieldwork by ethnographic observers in a handful of...

Michael Hout, Professor of Sociology, New York University. The election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States shocked many voters and most professional observers, but there were data to indicate the latent potential of such an outcome...

Stefanie Stantcheva, Assistant Professor of Economics, Harvard University. Using newly collected cross-country survey and experimental data, we investigate how beliefs about intergenerational mobility affect preferences for redistribution in five...