HOME / NEWS /

Doctoral Fellows

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

Can the Financial Benefit of Lobbying be Quantified?

Can the Financial Benefit of Lobbying be Quantified?

January 16, 2018
Washington Center for Equitable Growth | A look at a new paper by Inequality doctoral fellow Brian Libgober, PhD candidate in Government, and Daniel Carpenter, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government, "Lobbying with Lawyers: Financial Market Evidence for Banks' Influence on Rulemaking."
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.
View the research
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.
An inside view of credit checks in hiring

An inside view of credit checks in hiring

October 14, 2017
Work in Progress | By Barbara Kiviat, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy. Barbara Kiviat summarizes findings from her research, "The Art of Deciding with Data," recently published in Socio-Economic Review.  Work in Progress is the American Sociological Assocation's blog for short-form sociology on the economy, work, and inequality.
How the Equifax Hack Could Hurt Anyone Applying for a Job

How the Equifax Hack Could Hurt Anyone Applying for a Job

October 4, 2017
The Atlantic | By Barbara Kiviat, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy. Fraudulent activity will likely start to show up in Americans' credit history—which many employers use to evaluate prospective hires. This article is based on Barbara Kiviat's research, published in Socio-Economic Review, which found considerable subjectivity and lack of empirical basis for the way that employers used credit reports in hiring decisions.
View the research