Seattle Times | Features research by behavioral scientist Todd Rogers, Associate Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, which has shown that specific types of 'nudge' letters can reduce chronic absenteeism rates by 11-15 percent.
View the research

The Atlantic | Cites Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, on the ways in which racism and ethnic fears historically permeated newspaper coverage of crime and government crime statistics in the U.S.

Los Angeles Times | Features George J. Borjas, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.

NBC New York | Quoted: Michèle Lamont, Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, and Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard.

The New York Times | "This reorganization of employment is playing a big role in keeping a lid on wages — and in driving income inequality — across a much broader swath of the economy than globalization can account for," writes Economic Scene columnist Eduardo Porter.

Cites recent study by Lawrence Katz of Harvard and Alan Krueger of Princeton, which concluded that temp agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and freelancers accounted for 94% of U.S. employment growth from 2005 to 2015. View this research»

Also cites Katz on the pay gaps between firms as an important source of inequality: "Overall, Professor Katz estimates, the sorting of workers into high- and low-end employers accounts for a quarter to a third of the increase of wage inequality in the United States since 1980."

The New York Times | The New York Times consulted a panel of experts, among them Jennifer Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard, and Vesla Weaver (Ph.D. '07), Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of ISPS Center for the Study of Inequality at Yale University.

Financial Times | FT Books Essay by Martin Sandu recalls an instructive insight from an international trade theory course at Harvard with Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy.

Related
Comments on Economic Models, Economics, and Economists: Remarks on Economics Rules by Dani Rodrik
Journal of Economic Literature | By Ariel Rubinstein. "This essay reviews Dani Rodrik’s superb book Economics Rules and argues that it can serve as an ideal platform for discussing what economists can and should accomplish."

The New York Times | Martin West, Associate Professor of Education, comments on a recent research finding unusually large negative effects of vouchers on children's test scores in Louisiana.

The article also cites research by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff (PhD '04, now Columbia Business School) linking teachers' impacts on test scores (teacher value-added) to improved adult outcomes on a variety of measures.

And it notes that "the new voucher studies stand in marked contrast to research findings that well-regulated charter schools in Massachusetts and elsewhere have a strong, positive impact on test scores," citing research by Sarah Cohodes (PhD '15, now Columbia Teachers College) and collaborators. Cohodes and Susan Dynarski summarize the evidence in a 2016 Brookings Institution report, "Massachusetts charter cap holds back disadvantaged students."

The New York Times Magazine | Many Americans need jobs, or want better jobs, while employers have good jobs they can’t fill. Matching them up is the tricky part. Quoted: Lawrence Katz, Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics.

Harvard Gazette | Details new study by economics professor Amanda Pallais and colleagues, which found that when minority employees in a French grocery chain worked for biased managers their job performance dropped from 79th to 53rd percentile on average. Pallais is the Paul Sack Associate Professor of Political Economy and Social Studies. The study is forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
View the research

Quartz | Elizabeth Linos (PhD '16) discusses her work as head of research and evaluation Behavioural Insights Team - North America, which partnered with the Chattanooga police department in testing behavioral science approaches to increase the diversity of its force.

Vox | Cites recent study by Matthew Desmond, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard, Andrew V. Papachristos of Yale University, and David S. Kirk at University of Oxford, published in the American Sociological Review, which looked at the effects of highly publicized incidents of police brutality on 911 calls in Milwaukee.
View the research

Harvard Gazette | Unless social and economic inequalities are addressed, sustainability efforts in urban centers will likely stall or never take hold, according to a new Harvard study by Robert J. Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences. 

San Francisco Chronicle | Quoted: Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology.

Midterm elections such as 2018 favor opposition parties, which makes House Democrats “well positioned” as a fulcrum of the Trump resistance, said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University sociologist. “That’s the place where Democrats will be able to make gains, if they can pick up support from a broader array of people,” Skocpol said. “That and the governors races are the really critical turning points.”

Bloomberg View | New research suggests that growing market concentration may partly explain labor's declining share of national income, but what accounts for this growing market concentration? A new paper by  David Autor (MIT), David Dorn (University of Zurich), Lawrence Katz (Harvard), Christina Patterson (MIT), and John Van Reenen (MIT) suggests a technological explanation driving the rise of "superstar firms" in "winner take most' markets. This paper is forthcoming in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings.
View the research

Boston Globe | Why are Boston bakeries struggling to find skilled bakers? Alicia Sasser Modestino (Ph.D. '01) discusses the labor market. Modestino is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Economics at Northeastern University, and Associate Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy.

The Atlantic—CityLab | "Before 1980, places in America with lower average incomes grew faster than their richer counterparts, so that incomes converged. Today, that’s no longer the case." Richard Florida delves into a recent study by economists Peter Ganong, Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School, and Daniel Shoag (Ph.'11), Associate Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.
...

Harvard Gazette | Coverage of the JFK Jr. Forum event, "Alternatives to the Affordable Care Act," with panelists Katherine Baicker, C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics at Harvard; Jonathan Gruber, Ford Professor of Economics at MIT; Avik Roy, co-founder and president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity; and Gail R. Wilensky, senior fellow at Project HOPE and former director of Medicare and Medicaid. Moderated by Amitabh Chandra, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy. Co-sponsored by the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy.
View event video

MIT Technology Review | Quotes Lawrence Katz, Elisabath Allison Professor of Economics:“I’m very worried that the next wave [of AI and automation] will hit and we won’t have the supports in place,” says Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard. Katz has published research showing that large investments in secondary education in the early 1900s helped the nation make the shift from an agriculture-based economy to a manufacturing one. And now, he says, we could use our education system much more effectively. For example, some areas of the United States have successfully connected training programs at community colleges to local companies and their needs, he says, but other regions have not, and the federal government has done little in this realm. As a result, he says, “large areas have been left behind.”

Also quotes MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who presented his latest work in this area, "Machine vs. Man: The Labor Market in the Age of Robots," in the Harvard Inequality Seminar, Feb 6, 2017 (view seminar abstract).

Marketplace | “For every dollar people are contributing to the retirement savings system, about 40 cents of that money is coming out before people reach their late 50s,” said Brigitte Madrian, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “That’s a quite striking amount of leakage, especially when many people are not saving enough in the first place.”

... Read more about Charlotte Cavaillé: APSA Mancur Olson Best Dissertation Award in Political Economy 2016

Awardee | Daniel Schlozman (Ph.D. '11), Assistant Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, is the winner of the 2016 Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award for first book, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton University Press, 2015). The award is conferred by the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section of the American Sociological Association.

Awardee: Ellora Derenoncourt, Ph.D. candidate in Economics, is one of 19 new grantees in the Washington Center for Equitable Growth's 2016 class. Derenoncourt's research, "Social preferences at work: Evidence from online lab experiments and job-to-job mobility in the LEHD dataset," will will use online lab experiments and employee-employer matched data to look at labor market decisions, testing for individual social preferences over payoff distributions.

The award citation highlights that "this project is offers a novel twist on intra-firm mobility and job-to-job transitions by using preferences to look at labor market decisions and not simply tax preferences." Equitable Growth has worked with Derenoncourt before—she is a contributor to its forthcoming edited volume on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, "and this project is an example of her ability to engage with traditional economic literature and push it in interesting and useful new directions."

Awardees | Christopher Jencks, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy, and Beth Truesdale, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, are among the 19 new grantees in the Washington Center for Equitable Growth's 2016 class.  Jencks and Truesdale will investigate "The effects of income inequality on health disparities in the United States." Jencks and Truesdale hypothesize that some of the correlation between income inequality and health outcomes is causal, running from inequality to health, and will seek to identify the causal mechanisms.

"Uncovering the causal channels between inequality and health would be an important contribution," the award citation notes, "particularly in light of recent research examining the relationship between income and life expectancy." This research is co-funded by the Russell Sage Foundation.

Awardee | Blythe George, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology & Social Policy, is one of 19 new grantees in the Washington Center for Equitable Growth's 2016 class. George's research, "Those jobs ain’t coming back: The consequences of an industry collapse on two tribal reservations," will use qualitative data to explore the mechanisms that link the decline of employment options and life outcomes for males on two Native American tribal reservations, The Yurok and Hoopa Valley Reservations, located in California’s northwest.

"A member of the Yurok tribe herself, the researcher’s data provide a unique contribution ... [with] useful insights on the consequences of declining male labor force participation, particularly in non-urban settings." The award citation highlights that "From a policy engagement perspective, the rich[ness of] this qualitative work will help provide the narrative and texture that is necessary for capturing policy attention."

Awardee | Robert J. Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy. The Academy elected 42 distinguished UK academics and 20 scholars from overseas institutions in recognition of their outstanding contributions to research. It also elected four Honorary Fellows, including U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen. Learn more about Robert Sampson's work at his homepage.

Awardee | Natasha Warikoo (Ph.D. '05), Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University, has been awarded  a Russell Sage Foundation grant to study "Asian Americans in Suburban America: Academic Competition, Youth Culture, and Racial Change." Warikoo will examine academic competition in two wealthy suburbs that differ in their Asian populations, exploring how group boundaries, beliefs about success, youth culture, and conceptions of race change when upwardly-mobile Asian Americans enter the public school system in these higher-income, predominantly white communities.

Awardee | Judith Scott-Clayton (Ph.D. '09) is the recipient of the Robert P. Huff Golden Quill Award from the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), which is awarded on the basis of  "published work that exemplifies the highest quality of research methodology, analysis, or topical writing on the subject of student financial aid or its administration." Scott-Clayton is Associate Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Awardee | Jeremy Levine, Ph.D. '16 in Sociology, is the recipient of two American Sociological Association section awards for best graduate student paper in Community and Urban Sociology and in Political Sociology. The paper, forthcoming in the American Sociological Review, is titled "The Privatization of Political Representation: Community-Based Organizations as Nonelected Neighborhood Representatives.” Levine joins the University of Michigan faculty as Assistant Professor of Organizational Studies in September. Learn more about Levine's work at his website.

William T. Grant Foundation | Devah Pager, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy and Director of the Inequality & Social Policy program, will join the William T. Grant Foundation's Board of Trustees in 2017. The William T. Grant Foundation invests in research focused on reducing inequality and improving the use of research evidence to improve the lives of young people in the United States.

Pager is a former William T. Grant Scholar, a program that recognizes promising early career researchers in the in the social, behavioral, and health sciences and supports their professional development with five-year research awards. Other W.T. Grant Scholars include Inequality & Social Policy alumni David Deming (Ph.D. '10, now a Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education), Laura Tach (Ph.D. '09, now Cornell University), and Patrick Sharkey (Ph.D. '07, now NYU), and faculty affiliate Matthew Desmond of the Harvard Sociology Department.

Awardee | Jacqueline Rivers (Ph.D. '15). The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University has announced its fourth class of W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows. Rivers, who holds a  Ph.D. in African American Studies and Sociology at Harvard,  will work on a project titled The Power of Racial Socialization: A Form of Non-Elite Cultural Capital.

Awardee | Ellora Derenoncourt, Ph.D. candidate in Economics, is the recipient of a Louis O. Kelso fellowship from the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations for 2016-2017. Rutgers has selected 30 fellows to study broad-based employee ownership and profit-sharing in corporations. Derenoncourt will research the effects of differential levels of employee ownership benefits on employee satisfaction and quit rates.

Awardee | Mary C. Waters, M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology, is the recipient of the 2016 Distinguished Career Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on International Migration. Waters will receive the award in a ceremony on August 23 at the ASA Annual Meeting in Seattle.

Harvard Magazine | James Biblarz, Ph.D. student in Sociology and Social Policy and a tutor in Eliot House, received the Undergraduate Council’s John R. Marquand Prize for exceptional advising and counseling. The prize, awarded annually in May, recognizes an individual "who contributes to the quality of undergraduate life and education," with a focus on those who bring "skill and generosity in advising, counseling, and helping students.”

Harvard Kennedy School | Jennifer Lerner, Professor of Public Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School and Co-founder of the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, has been named to the U.S. Secretary to the Navy Advisory Panel (SNAP).

University of Edinburgh | Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, is the recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh. Following the ceremony, she will deliver the British Journal of Politics and International Relations public lecture addressing the question of why—in a world of growing interdependence and complex challenges—we need more and more ‘legitimate coercion’.

Awardee | Ariel R. White (Ph.D. '16), now Assistant Professor of Political Science at MIT, and co-authors Noah L. Nathan and Julie K. Faller are the recipients of the American Political Science Association's Heinz I. Eulau Award for best article published in the American Political Science Review in the past calendar year. All were Ph.D. candidates in Government at the time of publication.

For their article, "What do I Need to Vote? Bureaucratic Discretion and Discrimination by Local Election Officials," the authors carried out a field experiment in which they contacted over 7,000 local election officials in 48 states responsible for providing information to voters and implementing voter ID laws. They found that election officials were significantly less likely to respond to emails sent from Latino aliases and provided responses of lower quality than they did when replying to non-Latino white aliases.  
View the research

Congratulations to the 14 Inequality & Social Policy doctoral fellows receiving their Ph.D.'s today, and to all the graduates who have been part of our Inequality & Social Policy community.

Awardee | Sarah James, Ph.D. student in Government and Social Policy, has been selected to participate in The Tobin Project as a 2016 Graduate Student Fellow. The Tobin Project's Graduate Student Fellows program, which draws students from universities across the country, supports student research on real-world problems in the social sciences by providing research workshops and research fellowships to enable students to carry out a specific project.  James will pursue research on "Race and Street-Level Bureaucracy in Schools: An Examination of Texas’ School-based Police Forces."  Read more about Sarah James's work at her homepage.

Awardee | Torben Iversen, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, is the recipient of one of Denmark's oldest and most prestigious science awards, the the Rigmor and Carl Holst-Knudsen Award for Scientific Research. "Again and again," the award citation notes, "Torben Iversen’s work has set the agenda for research in a variety of areas, such as the welfare state, the role of central banks, salary negotiations, education, and electoral systems."

Foreign Affairs | By Douglas W. Elmendorf. "The development and passage of the ACHA is a case study in how not to make public policy," writes Elmendorf. Douglas Elmendorf is Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy. He served as the director of the Congressional Budget Office from January 2009 through March 2015.

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis | Robert Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, joined the inaugural conference of the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute, where he spoke in the opening panel on segregation and inequality. Putnam and Harvard economist Lawrence Katz both serve on the Institute's Board of Advisors.

Why Opportunity and Inclusion Matter to America's Economic Strength
Lael Brainard of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors delivered the keynote address, highlighting issues of employment, household financial health, the geography of opportunity, and affordable housing. She also drew attention to insights generated by the Boston Fed's Workng Cities Challenge.
View text of remarks
 

Earlier this spring Governor Brainard delivered the 2017 Malcolm Wiener Lecture in International Political Economy in the JFK Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School.

Harvard Kennedy School PolicyCast | Professor David Deming (PhD '10) sits down with PolicyCast host Matt Cadwallader to talk about his new Harvard Kennedy School course, The Causes and Consequences of Inequality (SUP-206). If traditional jobs like manufacturing aren’t coming back, how can the economy adapt? How can the American education system better prepare the next generation for the needs of the modern economy? Deming's research grapples with these questions.

Harvard Gazette | This past fall, Harvard President Drew Faust convened a University-wide task force to examine ways to help Harvard thrive as a place where all members of its increasingly diverse community feel that they truly belong. The task force is co-chaired by James Bryant Conant University Professor Danielle Allen, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics; Harvard Kennedy School Academic Dean Archon Fung, the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship; and Vice President for Campus Services Meredith Weenick.

The task force’s co-chairs recently sat down with the Harvard Gazette to discuss this report, their first year, and what’s next for this important work.

U.S. Congress Joint Economic Commitee | Professors Robert D. Putnam and Mario L. Small (PhD '01), joined by Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute and Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs, testified before the Joint Economic Committee on the potential role for social capital in addressing U.S. economic and social challenges.

Robert Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, focused on two generational concerns: why social capital matters in narrowing the opportunity gap among today's children, and what a boomer generation "aging alone" portends for U.S. eldercare costs in the years ahead.
Read Robert Putnam testimony

Mario Small, Grafstein Family Professor of Sociology, discussed the evidence that "early education and childcare programs may be an especially effective venue to help low-income parents generate social capital,"..." that this social capital is beneficial, and that there is reason to believe that targeted interventions may help such programs maximize these benefits."
Read Mario Small testimony

Gov Innovator Podcast | Andy Feldman (PhD '07) interviews Carrie Conaway (AM '01), Chief Strategy and Research Officer for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Conaway was recently appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Board for Education Sciences. Feldman is currently a visiting fellow with the Center for Children and Families at the Brookings Institution.

The 74 | Professor David Deming (PhD '10) on the lasting benefits of Head Start, school accountability, and integration. Deming is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The New York Times Magazine
By Matthew Desmond, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences.
 

Brookings Institution—The Brown Center Chalkboard | By Martin R. West (Faculty, Ph.D. '06)

Russell Sage Foundation | By Christopher Wimer (Ph.D. '07)

Congressional testimony| Testimony of  Scott Winship (Ph.D. '09) before Subcommittee on Human Resources, Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives.

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston | By Alicia Sasser Modestino (Ph.D. '01), Daniel Shoag (Ph.D. '11), and Joshua Ballance

Usable Knowledge (HGSE) | Interview with Ron Ferguson

The Journalist's Resource | Katherine Levine Einstein (Ph.D. '12)

Global Development Network | By Dan Honig, Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy. Award-winning essay of GDN Next Horizons Essay Competition.

Congressional Testimony | Testimony of Justin Wolfers (Ph.D. '01) before Committee on Finance, U.S. Senate.

Washington Center for Equitable Growth | By Elisabeth Jacobs

Scholars Strategy Network | By Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol

Brookings Institution—The Brown Center Chalkboard | By Matthew M. Chingos and Martin R. West (Faculty, Ph.D. '06)

Scholars Strategy Network | By Theda Skocpol

Poverty and Race Research Action Council | By Eva Rosen (Ph.D. '14)

Brookings Institution—The Brown Center Chalkboard | By Martin R. West (Faculty, Ph.D. '06)

Journalist's Resource | William Julius Wilson, Robert Sampson

Washington Center for Equitable Growth | By Elisabeth Jacobs

Boston University Initiative on Cities | By Katherine Levine Einstein (Ph.D. '12) and David M. Glick

Scholars Strategy Network | by Judith Scott-Clayton (Ph.D. '09)

Scholars Strategy Network | By Jackelyn Hwang, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology & Social Policy.

Journalist's Resource | Joshua Goodman