HOME / NEWS / DOCTORAL FELLOWS /

In the News

Blythe George

Blythe George to be published in Vision 2020, a book of 21 innovative and evidence-based ideas to shape the 2020 policy debate

December 3, 2019

Washington Center for Equitable Growth | Blythe George, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy, is a contributor to the forthcoming book, Vision 2020: Evidence for a Stronger Economy, to be released in mid-to-late January by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. The book, announced at Equitable Growth's Vision 2020 conference last month, is "a compilation of 21 innovative, evidence-based, and concrete ideas to shape the 2020 policy debate." A member of the Yurok tribe, Blythe focuses on reentry back into tribal life after incarceration.

Robert Manduca

Watch Four Decades of Inequality Drive American Cities Apart

December 2, 2019

The New York Times | Research by Robert Manduca, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy, is featured in The Upshot. The articles cited have been published in Social Forces and ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, respectively.

“'We’ve had this pulling apart of the overall income distribution,” said Robert Manduca, a Ph.D. student in sociology and social policy at Harvard who has found that about half of the economic divergence between different parts of the country is explained by trends in national inequality. “That overall pulling apart has had very different effects in different places, based on which kinds of people were already living in those places.'

"Mr. Manduca says national policies like reinvigorating antitrust laws would be most effective at reducing inequality (the consolidation of many industries has meant, among other things, that smaller cities that once had company headquarters have lost those jobs, sometimes to big cities)."

robertmanduca.com ►

First day of school for Boston first-graders. Photo by Pat Greenhouse, Boston Globe.

Late registrations complicate the start of school for many Boston families

September 5, 2019

Boston Globe | Features research by Kelley Fong, PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy, and Sarah Faude of Northeastern University.

"Two researchers from Harvard and Northeastern universities raised alarms last year about inequities in Boston’s school assignment system. After examining late registrations, the researchers concluded 'nearly half of black kindergartners miss the first registration deadline, a rate almost three times higher than their white peers, consigning them to the least preferred schools.'

“'We find that late registration is highly stratified, disproportionately experienced by black and Hispanic children as well as children living in lower-income neighborhoods,” the authors, Kelley Fong and Sarah Faude, wrote."

 
View the research ►
scholar.harvard.edu/kfong ►

ECINEQ

Stone PhD Scholars present research at 8th ECINEQ Meeting Paris 2019

July 3, 2019

Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) | Stone PhD Scholars Alex Albright (Economics) , Nicholas Short (Government & Social Policy), and Oren Danieli PhD'19 (Business Economics) have been selected to present papers at the eighth meeting of Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) at the Paris School of Economics, July 3-5, 2019.

Keynote speakers: Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard University, Marianne Bertrand of University of Chicago, and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics.

... View program and papers ►

Robert J. Sampson

Harvard study shows the predictive power of punishing and toxic environments on children's outcomes

May 17, 2019

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.

Robert Manduca

Study finds gap between rich and poor growing regionally, too

May 2, 2019

Harvard Gazette | A new paper by Robert Manduca, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy, now out in Social Forces.

“In 1980, only about 12 percent of the population lived in places that were especially rich or especially poor,” Manduca said. “By 2013, it was over 30 percent. So what we’re seeing is a polarization, where people are increasingly living in places that are either much richer or much poorer than the country overall.”

While part of that shift is due to sorting — the notion that high-earning people and high-paying jobs have become more geographically concentrated — Manduca shows that the rise in national income inequality can account for more than half of the economic divergence across regions that we observe.

... View the research ▶

How the 1 Percent Is Pulling America’s Cities and Regions Apart

How the 1 Percent Is Pulling America’s Cities and Regions Apart

April 3, 2019
CityLab | By Richard Florida.

The two gravest challenges facing America today, economic inequality and geographic divides, are increasingly intertwined. Economic inequality has surged with nearly all the growth being captured by the 1 percent, and the economic fortunes of coastal superstar cities and the rest of the nation have dramatically diverged.

These two trends are fundamental to a new study by Robert Manduca, a PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University. The study uses census microdata culled from 1980 to 2013, and finds that America’s growing regional divide is largely a product of national economic inequality, in particular the outsized economic gains that have been captured by the 1 percent.

... Read more ▶

How Pollution Can Hurt the Health of the Economy

How Pollution Can Hurt the Health of the Economy

November 27, 2018

The New York Times | Children are especially vulnerable to the effects of pollution. Daniel Prinz, a Harvard PhD candidate in Health Policy and Stone PhD Scholar, is the author of a recent paper on the subject. “The evidence is overwhelming that pollutants encountered in utero can cause long-term harm,” Mr. Prinz said.

View the research ►