The Atlantic—CityLab | While some nations have seen rapid urbanization lead to economic progress, others have fallen behind. Discusses new study by Edward Glaeser and colleagues that compares the process of urbanization in three of the world’s largest emerging economies—Brazil, China, and India—to that of the United States. Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard.
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The New York Times | Alexander Keyssar, who is working on a book on the Electoral College, explains that the process of succession would depend on “the precise moment at which he said, ‘Nah, never mind.'" Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The New York Times | Quotes Phillip Atiba Goff on the findings of "The Science of Justice: Race, Arrests, and the Use of Force," a new study significant for its assembly and empirical analysis of detailed use-of-force data in the nation's first national database on police behavior. Goff, a visiting scholar at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy from 2014-2016, is co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity, which released the report, and the Franklin A. Thomas Professor in Policing Equity at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Tracey (Shollenberger) Lloyd (Ph.D. '15), a research associate in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, is a co-author of the study.
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Forbes | Covers new study and recent NBER conference organized by economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, Women Working Longer. The conference explored the growing numbers of women working full-time into their sixties and seventies, and the family and financial implications of this change.
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The Sydney Morning Herald |Labor MP Andrew Leigh (Ph.D. '04) won his third term representing Canberra's north, clinching 65.8 percent of the two-party vote and a 3.3 percent swing.

The New York Times | "A growing body of economic literature suggests that anti-growth sentiment, when multiplied across countless unheralded local development battles, is a major factor in creating a stagnant and less equal American economy." Quotes Daniel Shoag (Ph.D. '11), Associate Professor at Harvard Kennedy School, and cites his research with Peter Ganong (Harvard Economics Ph.D. '16), who joins the University of Chicago Harris School faculty in 2017.
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The Atlantic | Quotes Elisabeth Jacobs (Ph.D. '08), Senior Director for Policy and Academic Programs, Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

Slate | Too many Americans live on the edge of eviction. Could a universal housing voucher program fix the problem? Draws on the work of Matthew Desmond, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016).

Dissent | Review essay by Mike Konczal explores Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond of Harvard, and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud, by David Dayen.

Boston Globe | New study by Alicia Sasser Modestino (Ph.D. '01) of Northeastern University and Trinh Nguyen of the Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development for the City of Boston. Modestino is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which released the study.

Pacific Standard | Coverage of new research by Ryan Enos, Associate Professor of Government, and Anthony Fowler of University of Chicago finds that “contrary to some expectations, large-scale campaigns can significantly increase the size and composition of the voting population, rather than simply mobilizing a small fraction of voters on the margin.”
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Washington Post | Harvard analysts assess Brexit's implications, including Peter A. Hall, Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies. "Euro-skeptical parties on the radical right and left of the political spectrum have been encouraged by the British vote to demand similar referenda in their own countries,” Hall said. “But mainstream political leaders are anxious to prevent this. They can only do so if they retain power, and that will be their first priority.  They can only do so if they can revive economic growth in Europe and limit the backlash against immigration. That will be very difficult to do.”

Center for American Progress | The Center for American Progress, along with major leaders in the health policy community and physicians, issued a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell urging next steps on Medicare payment reform. Amitabh Chandra, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy is one of the 11 signatories.

Colorado Public Radio | Quotes Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, who leads a team of researchers studying Libre and other advocacy groups and organizations operating around the Democratic and Republican parties. [text and audio: 5 minutes]

For more on the Libre Initiative, see the factual brief by Angie Bautista-Chavez (Ph.D. student in Government) and Sarah James (Ph.D. student in Government & Social Policy), produced for the Scholars Strategy Network.

NBCNews.com | Congressional Black Caucus Chairman G. K. Butterfield (D- NC), and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) have issued a public letter calling on the CEO of Airbnb to address issues of discrimination on its platform. The letter specifically urges consideration of practical measures suggested by Michael Luca, Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School, in a recent article in the Washington Post. The article also highlights the findings of Luca's study with HBS colleagues Benjamin Edelman and Dan Svirsky, "Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment."
View the research... Read more about Two Black Members of Congress condemn racism on Airbnb

FiveThirtyEight | New research by political scientists Bernard Fraga (Ph.D '13) of Indiana University and Eitan Hersh of Yale University finds, surprisingly, that nearly the entire U.S. has experienced very close electoral contests in recent years. "For readers who take comfort in the stability in competition that has characterized recent presidential elections," writes Hersh, "gird yourself."
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Harvard Magazine | New findings by Michèle Lamont and co-authors Veronica Boix Mansilla and Kyoko Sato on what makes for successful interdisciplinary collaborations. Lamont is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Harvard.

Vox | An in-depth look at welfare reform 20 years on: the history of US welfare policy and origins of welfare reform, implementation of the 1996 law, assessments of its effects on poverty, and the policy discussion today among poverty experts. Quoted or featured in the piece: Mary Jo Bane, David Ellwood, Christopher Jencks, and William Julius Wilson, all of the Harvard Kennedy School.

Salon | Recaps highlights from the workshop, Purchasing Power? The Next Generation of Research on Money and Politics, sponsored by the Scholars Strategy Network and hosted by the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation in New York City, June 16-17, 2016. Features new research by Harvard's Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, and by Alex Hertel-Fernandez (Ph.D. '16), Assistant Professor of Public and International Affairs at Columbia University.

Washington Post | Quotes and cites research of Eva Rosen (Ph.D. '14), now a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Also cites research by faculty affiliate Matthew Desmond and Kristin L. Perkins (Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Social Policy), and by Robert Collinson and Peter Ganong (Harvard Ph.D. '16, now Chicago Harris School of Public Policy).

PBS NewsHour | By Leah Wright Rigueur, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. "The extremism of Donald Trump somewhat obscures the complex role that race has played in Hillary Clinton’s campaign," Rigueur writes.  Second in a series of perspectives in advance of Thursday's 2016 Hutchins Forum: Race and the Race to the White House, in which Rigueur is a panelist.  PBS NewsHour will live-stream the forum here.

WNYC The Brian Lehrer Show | Conversation with Khalil Gibran Muhammad, who recently joined the Harvard Kennedy School faculty as Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy.

Wall Street Journal | By Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West. Most rank-and-file Democrats disagree with the party platform, Peterson and West argue, drawing from a survey to be published next week in Education Next. Peterson is Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard. West (Ph.D. '06) is Associate Professor of Education.

CNN | Features insights of Leah Wright Rigueur, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Project Syndicate | By Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School. The problems of our day have little to do with a lack of global cooperation, but rather are rooted in failures of domestic deliberation, Rodrik argues.  Improved democratic decision-making ought to be our focus.

"Perhaps the biggest policy letdown of our day is the failure of governments in advanced democracies to address rising inequality. This, too, has its roots in domestic politics—financial and business elites’ grip on the policymaking process and the narratives they have spun about the limits of redistributive policies."... Read more about The False Economic Promise of Global Governance

Washington Post | Opinion column by political theorist Danielle Allen, Professor of Government, argues that the House Speaker, in his reluctance to repudiate the GOP candidate, is enabling the "further and especially steep descent of American political culture into a nihilism corrosive enough to imperil the foundations of democracy and constitutional politics."

Oxford Government Review |  By Elizabeth Linos (Ph.D. '16), in the inaugural issue of the Oxford Government Review (p. 41). Linos and Harvard's Jeffrey Liebman, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Public Policy, spoke at the Challenges of Government Conference 2016, held at the University of Oxford Blavatnik School of Government in May 2016.

Linos is currently VP and Head of Research and Evaluation at the Behavioral Insights Team in North America, where she works with city governments across the US to improve programs using behavioral science and to build capacity around rigorous evaluation. Lean more about Linos's research:
scholar.harvard.edu/elinos

Oxford Government Review | By Jeffrey Liebman, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Public Policy, in the inaugural issue of the Oxford Government Review (p. 50). Liebman and Elizabeth Linos (Ph.D. '16) spoke at the Challenges of Government Conference 2016, held at the University of Oxford Blavatnik School of Government in May 2016. Conference summaries and videos are also included at the link.

Vox | Discussion with Robert Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy. 

"I think the category of people that you're calling liberal cosmopolitans, really the upper and upper middle class of America, are increasingly disconnected from working-class America. I mean that in a very specific sense," Robert Putnam said. "Our residences are increasingly segregated by class. Our schools are increasingly segregated by class. Our extended families are increasingly separated by class."

Washington Post | By Lawrence Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor. Summers makes the progressive case for championing pro-growth policies. This column also appeared in the Financial Times.

HCEO | Nathaniel Hendren, Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard, sits down for a short video interview to discuss his research, which addresses a broad range of issues at the intersection of theoretical and empirical work in public economics. Hendren talks about his work on insurance markets, on intergenerational mobility, important questions for future research and policy, and his perspectives on integrating theory and empirics. 

Asked about important issues that have not been addressed in any of these literatures: "I think the idea that place matters [for children’s outcomes and economic mobility] has generated interest in thinking about place as a potential role for policy." But what's really difficult, says Hendren, is thinking about the trade-offs between place-based and choice-based policies, as well as national approaches such as income tax measures. "I think all of these analyses will be part of an agenda in the next 5-10 years to really understand the relative benefits and tradeoffs of the different options we have for improving the opportunities faced by low-income kids.”

Hendren has taught in HCEO's Summer School on Socioeconomic Inequality at the University of Chicago for the past two years.

The New York Times | By Leah Wright Rigueur, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School. "With every news cycle focused on Donald J. Trump’s latest misstep, it’s easy to overlook the fact that his campaign has drawn record low support from African-Americans — and that this achievement, as it were, illuminates something worrisome within the Republican Party itself."

Vox | By Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol. "Faced with a loose-cannon 2016 GOP presidential nominee who disagrees with them on key issues, Charles and David Koch — the two billionaire "Koch brothers" — are directing the vast resources of their political network toward down-ballot races. This should alarm liberals greatly," write Hertel-Fernandez and Skocpol.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez (Ph.D. '16) is an assistant professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University. Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University.

The Guardian | By Bruce Western, Professor of Sociology and Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy. With research teams from Harvard University, Western has been studying incarceration and its aftermath at Rikers Island, and more recently, in the Top End of the Northern Territory in Australia. Here he explores the parallels of mass incarceration, poverty, and racial inequality.... Read more about Prison goes hand in hand with poverty and violence in the Northern Territory

Bangor Daily News | By Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government & Sociology

Democracy Journal | By Michael Javen Fortner (Ph.D. '10), Assistant Professor and Academic Director of Urban Studies at the Murphy Institute, CUNY.... Read more about The Last Hurrah of the "Silent Majority"?

IZA Newsroom |  Interview with George J. Borjas, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and program director of IZA’s Labor Mobility research area.

Urban Institute | By Steven Brown, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and an affiliated scholar with the Urban Institute.

Weatherhead Center—Epicenter | By Bart Bonikowski, Associate Professor of Sociology. Harvard sociologist Bart Bonikowski explains why Brexit has two important lessons for political analysis on both sides of the Atlantic.

Washington Post | By Samuel Sommers (Tufts) and Michael Norton (Harvard Business School): Our research found whites think anti-white bias is more of a problem than anti-black bias. Our research also suggests that among whites, there’s a lingering view that the American Dream is a “fixed pie,” such that the advancement of one group of citizens must come at the expense of all the other groups.
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