The Weekly Standard | Review of George J. Borjas's book, We Wanted Workers (W.W. Norton, 2016). Borjas is Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

The Economist | Cites study by Devah Pager, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, which examined the job performance of former felons in the U.S. Army.

The Economist | Cites Todd Rogers, Associate Professor at Harvard Kennedy School. Also features work in which Elizabeth Linos (PhD '16) of  Behavioural Insights Team North America participated, a collaboration with the Chattanooga Police Department to attract more minority applicants to the force. (Read a detailed account of the Chattanooga experiment, including an interview with Linos, which appeared earlier this year in Quartz).

Bloomberg | Quoted: Behavioral economist Brigitte Madrian of the Harvard Kennedy School.

The New York Times | Cites study by Amitabh Chandra (joint with Jonathan Gruber and Robin McKnight), published in the American Economic Review. "For sicker Medicare beneficiaries, the Harvard economist Amitabh Chandra and colleagues found, increased Medicare hospital spending exceeded any savings from reduced drug prescriptions and doctor’s visits."

Harvard University Press | Ellora Derenoncourt, Ph.D. candidate in Economics, has authored a chapter in After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, released today by Harvard University Press. Derenoncourt's contribution "addresses the deep historical and institutional origins of [global] wealth inequality, which she argues may be driven by what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson identify as 'extractive' versus 'inclusive' institutions."

The 688-page volume, edited by Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, brings together published reviews by Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Robert Solow and newly-commissioned essays by Suresh Naidu, Laura Tyson, Michael Spence, Heather Boushey, Branko Milanovic, and many others. Emmanuel Saez lays out an agenda for future research on inequality, while a variety of essays examine the book's implications for the social sciences more broadly. Harvard Inequality & Social Policy alumna Elisabeth Jacobs (PhD '08), now senior director of research and a senior fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, probes the political dimension in her contribution, "Everywhere and Nowhere: Politics in Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Piketty replies in a substantial concluding chapter.

Huffington Post | Marian Wright Edelman, President of the Children's Defense Fund, urges Congress to heed the evidence and invest in early childhood brain development, citing Ron Ferguson's work with the Boston Basics initiative and findings from Harvard's Center on the Developing Child. Ferguson is faculty director of Harvard's Achievement Gap Initiative and a fellow in the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy.

The New York Times | A new study by Amy Finkelstein (MIT), Nathaniel Hendren (Harvard Economics), and Matthew Shepard (Harvard Kennedy School) exploits a natural experiment from Massachusetts health insurance subsidies and finds that "as subsidies fall, insurance take-up falls rapidly" among low-income individuals.
View the research

The Economist | Digs into new working paper by Dara Lee Luca (Mathematica Policy Research) and Michael Luca, Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School, "Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit."
View the research

The New York Times | Thomas B. Edsall column discusses a growing body of scholarly work showing that upper-middle class and affluent African-Americans have experienced substantial income gains within the past 15 years. Cites William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard, who has drawn attention to growing economic inequality and the increased heterogeneity of experience within the black community. Wilson is writing a book on upward social mobility among African-Americans.

... Read more about Alexander Hertel-Fernandez: APSA 2017 Harold D. Laswell Dissertation Prize

Russell Sage Foundation | Helen Marrow (PhD '07), Associate Professor of Sociology at Tufts University, has been selected to be a Visiting Researcher at the Russell Sage Foundation in 2017-2018. While in residence, she will work on her next book on Immigrant-Native Relations in 21st Century America. The book is a collaborative project with scholars Dina Okamato of Indiana University, Linda Tropp of University of Massachsuetts-Amherst, and Michael Jones-Correa of University of Pennsylvania. Read more about Helen Marrow's work:
helenmarrow.com

G20 Insights | Carlos Lastra-Anadón, PhD candidate in Government & Social Policy, has co-authored a policy brief that has been selected to appear in "20 Solution Proposals for the G20" to be circulated to summit participants at the G20 Hamburg summit, July 7-8, 2017. Theirs is one of 20 policy recommendations "chosen for their novelty, implementability, and relevance to the G20 during the German presidency."

The brief is co-authored by Manuel Muñiz (Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University), Karl Kaiser (Harvard University), Henning Meyer (London School of Economics), and Manuel Torres (Accenture).

Université de Bordeaux | Harvard sociologist Michèle Lamont is the recipient of the Doctorate Honoris Causa, conferred by the Université de Bordeaux in a ceremony and conference held June 14th. The honorary title is awarded to persons of foreign nationality for outstanding service in the arts, letters, sciences, and technology.

Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies. She serves as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association in 2016-2017.

Awardee | Hope Harvey, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy, has been awarded the 2017 Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) Family Division Graduate Student Paper Prize for her paper, "When Mothers Can’t ‘Pay the Cost to be the Boss’: Roles and Identity within Doubled-Up Households." Read more about Hope Harvey's work at her homepage.
scholar.harvard.edu/hopeharvey

Russell Sage Foundation | The Russell Sage Foundation announced four new awards from its small grant competition in intergenerational mobility, three of which will support research by Harvard Inequality & Social Policy affiliates:

• Ellora Derenoncourt (Harvard University)
  Did Great Migration Destinations become Mobility Traps?
  Ellora Derenoncourt is a PhD candidate in Economics.
   
• Ryan D. Enos (Harvard University)
  Do Public Works Programs Increase Intergenerational Mobility? Evidence from the Works Progress Administration
  Ryan Enos is Associate Professor of Government.
   
• James J. Feigenbaum (Princeton University), Maximillian Hell (Stanford University), and Robert Manduca (Harvard University)
  The American Dream in the Great Depression: Absolute Income Mobility in the United States, 1915-1940
  James Feigenbaum (Harvard PhD '16) is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. In fall 2017 he will join the Boston University faculty as Assistant Professor of Economics. Maximillian Hell is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Stanford University.  Robert Manduca is a PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy at Harvard University.

Read the project abstracts

Awardee | Matthew Desmond receives 2017 top honor for Evicted, announced today by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights. Desmond is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard.
 

Awardee | Hope Harvey, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology & Social Policy is one of three Harvard University doctoral students selected to be a Graduate Student Fellow in the 2017-2018 class of Radcliffe Fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Hope will spend the year completing her dissertation, Exploring the Impacts of Doubling Up on American Families, with a Radcliffe Institute Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Learn more about Hope's work at her...

Harvard Magazine | Devah Pager, Leah Wright Rigueur, and Alexandra Killewald are featured among the 52 fellows who will be in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for the 2017-2018 academic year. 

Devah Pager, director of the the Inequality & Social Policy program and Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, will investigate "Race, Discrimination, and the Search for Work." Leah Wright Rigueur, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, whose work focuses on race and the American political system, will be conducting research for her project “Black Men in a White House.” Sociology professor Alexandra Killewald’s project, “Tethered Lives: How the Male Breadwinner Norm Constrains Men and Women” will build off of her research, which focuses on the work-family intersection and the effects of marriage and parenting on income.
View the full list of fellows

Boston Review | By Archon Fung, Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship. In this essay, Fung explores three new books on inequality which "draw an important and disturbing picture of America as a system of compounding inequality driven by a hereditary meritocracy of professional elites." One of Boston Review's Top Ten Reads in Inequality in 2017.

The fall 2017 Harvard Inequality Seminar featured the authors of two of these books: Thomas Shapiro, author of Toxic Inequality, on November 13, and Richard V. Reeves, author of Dream Hoarders, on November 27, 2017. Joan C. Williams, author of White Working Class, spoke at Harvard's Inequality in America Symposium, organized by the FAS Division of Social Science on October 13, 2017.

PBS Newshour | Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard, and PBS NewsHour’s special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault hosted and moderated the 2017 Hutchins Forum on “Race and Racism in the Age of Trump.” They were joined by Inequality & Social Policy faculty members Leah Wright Riguer and Lawrence D. Bobo, as well as New York Times columnist Charles Blow, Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law, NPR Politics reporter Asma Khalid, White House corrrspondent April Ryan, and conservative radio host Armstrong Williams. ...

Jal Mehta (PhD '06) is the 2016–2017 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute and Associate Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Journalist's Resource | Maya Sen

Scholars Strategy Network | By Joseph R. Blasi, Douglas L. Kruse (Rutgers), and Richard B. Freeman

Journalist's Resource | Bruce Western

Peter G. Peterson Foundation | Two viewpoints: Scott Winship (Ph.D. 09) of the Manhattan Institute and Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Brookings Institution—Social Mobility Memos | By Scott Winship.  Second of a series of memos on both sides of the "The Great Gatsby Curve" debate, including pieces by Alan Krueger (Princeton University) and Heather Boushey (Washington Center for Equitable Growth).

Gov Innovator Podcast | Hosted by Andy Feldman (Ph.D. '07)

MDRC | By Ronald F. Ferguson, Jason Snipes (WestEd), Farhana Hossain (MDRC), and Michelle S. Manno (MDRC)

Council of Economic Advisers | CEA Chairman Jason Furman web brief provides a more detailed detailed discussion of the research mentioned in his New York Times op-ed, "Smart Social Programs". This brief highlights research by  Sarah Cohodes (Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy), David Deming (faculty member and Ph.D. '10), Lawrence Katz, Jeffrey Liebman, Jonah Rockoff (Ph.D. '04), and Christopher Wimer (Ph.D. '07).

Economics 21 | By Scott Winship (Ph.D. '09)

JAMA Internal Medicine | By Katherine Baicker (HSPH) and Amitabh Chandra

Gov Innovator Podcast | Hosted by Andy Feldman (Ph.D. '07).

Economics 21 | By Scott Winship (Ph.D. '09)

Economics 21 | By Scott Winship (Ph.D. '09)

Gov Innovator Podcast | Hosted by Andy Feldman (Ph.D. '07)

Urban Institute | Featuring Patrick Sharkey (Ph.D. '07)

Peterson Institute for International Economics | Background briefing for PIIE event, with briefs by Justin Wolfers (Ph.D. '01)

Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Research Working Paper Series | By Daniel Shoag (Ph.D. 11)

Washington Center for Equitable Growth | Vanessa Williamson, Ph.D. candidate in Government & Social Policy

Policy Exchange | By Scott Winship (Ph.D. '09), in The Central Contradiction of Capitalism?  A Collection of Essays on 'Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century', Geoffrey Wood and Steve Hughes, eds.

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