Harvard Gazette
Coverage of new study by Robert Manduca, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy, and Robert J. Sampson, the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, now out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They find that neighborhood measures of lead exposure, violence, and incarceration have strong independent predictive power, on top of standard variables, for children's life outcomes.

Harvard Gazette | A new study by Joscha Legewie, Assistant Professor of Sociology, found that aggressive policing in New York City had significant educational and social consequences for African American boys. Legewie sat down for an interview about this work, joint with Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia Law School, recently published in the American Sociological Review.

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The Tobin Project | On April 26th and 27th, the Tobin Project hosted a Conference on Inequality and Decision Making, convening forty-seven scholars of psychology, sociology, economics, and other fields to investigate the impacts of high and/or rising economic inequality on individuals’ behavior.

Harvard faculty members Ryan D. Enos (Government), Christopher Jencks (Harvard Kennedy School), Mario Luis Small (Sociology), and Michael Norton (Harvard Business School) opened the conference with a panel on how people become aware of high and rising economic inequality. Other panels featured Zoe B. Cullen (Harvard Business School) and Beth Truesdale, PhD'17, now a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard. Jason Furman (Harvard Kennedy School and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, 2013-2017) gave the keynote address. 

PhD Scholars Kiera Hudson, Shom Mazumder, Preeya Mbekeani, and Nozomi Nakajima were selected to join the conference as well. 

David A. Moss (Harvard Business School and Founder of The Tobin Project) and Michael Norton served on the conference advisory board that developed and planned the event.

Harvard Gazette | Harvard and the University of Michigan have formed two partnerships designed to encourage economic opportunity in Detroit and to fight the national scourge of opioid addiction. 

The Detroit-focused partnership pairs the Equality of Opportunity Project — led by Harvard’s William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics Raj Chetty, Harvard economics Professor Nathaniel Hendren, and Brown University Associate Professor John Friedman — with the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions initiative, the city of Detroit, and community partners. It seeks to create interventions that can improve the livelihoods of low-income Detroit residents.