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

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.

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."

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.
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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."
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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.

Money | Discusses new Hamilton Project policy proposal by David J. Deming (PhD '10), Professor of Education and Economics at HGSE and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

The rising cost of a college degree is only one-half of the problem. The other? Far too few students who start college actually go on to earn a degree. And free tuition models could exacerbate that problem by increasing enrollment at already under-resourced state colleges without improving colleges’ ability to handle an influx of students.

The solution, according to a paper released today by Harvard economist David Deming, is to provide states with a financial incentive to focus on improving outcomes while also reducing costs to families. Deming is suggesting Congress establish a matching grant program, to be paid by the federal government to states with free tuition programs.
Get the full paper

Boston Globe | Reports on a new Boston Basics campaign, targeted in one city's poorest neighborhoods, to build babies’ cognitive and learning abilities from birth to age 3.

Research shows that 80 percent of brain growth occurs during the first three years of life and that racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic gaps can become apparent by age 2, said Ron Ferguson, faculty director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University, which is helping to launch the campaign.

“By the age of two, those gaps are already there,” Ferguson said at a presentation to more than two dozen officers at the B-3 police precinct in Mattapan on Monday. “And by the time [children] start school those gaps are way behind."

The Atlantic | When given the chance, will wealthy parents ever choose to desegregate schools? Features research by Ann Owens (PhD '12), now Assistant Professor of Sociology and Spatial Sciences at USC, Sean Reardon of Stanford, and Christopher Jencks of Harvard Kennedy School, which "found that segregation between poor and non-poor students in public schools grew more than 40 percent from 1991 to 2012." (AERJ 2016)
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Washington Post | Michael Luca, Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School, talks with the Post about his latest working paper (joint with Dara Lee Luca of Mathematica Policy Research), "Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit."
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Awardees | The Law and Society Association has awarded Matthew Clair, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, and Alix Winter, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology & Social Policy, its John Hope Franklin Prize for the best article on race, racism, and the law published in the past two years. The article, How Judges Think about Racial Disparties: Situational Decision-Making in the Criminal Justice System, "reveals that judges who routinely impose sentences with a differential racial impact sometimes intervene to mitigate the effects, and in many cases, justify decision making that continues to perpetuate disparities," in the words of the award citation. In so doing, "this article provides valuable new insights into the legal consciousness of elite actors and their thinking about the discriminatory impact of their decisions."
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Awardee | Torben Iversen, Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy, is one of 228 newly-elected members to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780, membership in the Academy recognizes "some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists, as well as civic, business, and philanthropic leaders."
View the 2017 class by field

Awardee | Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City has won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. The award citation lauded Desmond's book "as a deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty." Desmond is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard.

Natasha Warikoo (Ph.D. '05), Associate Professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is one of 173 scholars, artists, and scientists announced today as 2017 Guggenheim Fellows. "Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise," this year's class was selected from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the Guggenheim Foundation's 93rd annual competition.

Warikoo will spend her fellowship year working on a book about racial change in suburban America. "She is studying how the settlement of the nation’s most successful immigrant groups in privileged, previously predominantly white communities shapes the nature of racial boundaries, beliefs about success and achievement, and youth cultures," notes her Guggenheim Fellow profile (Read more).

Vera Institute of Justice | The Vera Institute of Justice announced today the appointment of Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School to its board of trustees. 

PEN New England | Sociologist Matthew Desmond's Evicted has won the 2017 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction. Earlier thiis year, Desmond, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, was named the recipient of PEN America's John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

Matthew Desmond, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, was recognized tonight with the 2016 National Books Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

"Just a few books have reframed the national conversation about poverty: How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York by Jacob Riis, The Other America by Michael Harrington, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America by Alex Kotlowitz," wrote NBCC board member Elizabeth Taylor.

"With his ground-breaking book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond now forcefully shapes our understanding of poverty. His focus is on the dynamics of poverty, and with remarkable clarity explains why solutions directed at joblessness or low wages reflect a misunderstanding of the problem. He eloquently argues: poverty is a product of exploitation, and that eviction not just a condition of it but rather a cause of it."

Awardee | Stefanie Stantcheva, Assistant Professor of Economics, is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, an NSF-wide initiative "that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty." Stantcheva will investigate "Taxes and Innovation: Optimal Taxation and the Effects of Taxes on Entrepreneurs, Inventors, and Firms' Innovation."

Awardee | Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, has been selected to receive Columbia University Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service, the highest honor it bestows. Muhammad will be honored and address the graduates at TC's doctoral hooding ceremony on May 17.

Awardee | The winners of the 2016 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Awards in fiction and nonfiction were announced today in a ceremony in New York City. Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City took first place in the non-fiction category. Desmond is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard.

Awardee | Political scientist Maya Sen, Assistant Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, has been selected to be a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University for the 2017-2018 academic year. Sen's research examines issues in the political economy of race relations, the American legal system, and law and politics. 

Learn more about Sen's work:
scholar.harvard.edu/msen

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. ...

American Academy of Arts and Sciences | Final report of the bipartisan Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, co-chaired by Danielle Allen of Harvard University, Stephen B. Heintz, and Eric Liu. The report includes 31 recommendations to strengthen America’s institutions and civic culture to help a nation in crisis emerge with a more resilient democracy.

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View launch event and discussion ►

PolicyInsights.org | By Nathaniel Hendren and Ben Sprung-Keyser. This interactive website offers a guided tour of their paper, "A Unified Welfare Analysis of Government Policies," forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Hendren is a Professor of Economics at Harvard; Sprung-Keyser is a PhD student in Economics.

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The Hamilton Project | By Jason Furman, Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy, Harvard Kennedy School. This policy proposal is part of a larger book available for download from the Hamilton Project, "Tackling the Tax Code: Efficient and Equitable Ways to Raise Revenue," and accompanying event hosted by the Hamilton Project.

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View event video

American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings | By Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik, and Gabriel Zucman.  A revised and updated version of their introduction to the Economics for Inclusive Prosperity (EfIP) policy briefs, published originally in the Boston Review (Feb 2019).

Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies | By Alix Winter (PhD 2019) and Robert J. Sampson. Alix Winter received her PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard in 2019 and is now a Postdoctoral Research Scholar with the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) at Columbia University. Robert Sampson is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard.

American Economics Association | Among the top 10 research highlights of 2019, "Tech: Economists Wanted." An interview with Susan Athey and Michael Luca about the mutual influence between economics and the tech sector. Michael Luca is the Lee J. Styslinger III Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Harvard Kennedy School | Assistant Professor Benjamin Schneer's research shows a complex correlation between how members of Congress vote on immigration bills and their family history. Joint work with economist James Feigenbaum PhD 2016 and political scientist Maxwell Palmer, both of Boston University.

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Immigration Initiative at Harvard
Findings from the National UnDACAmented Research Project (NURP). By Roberto G. Gonzales, Sayil Camacho, Kristina Brant, and Carlos Aguilar. Roberto G. Gonzales is Professor of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Kristina Brant is a PhD candidate in Sociology and an Inequality & Social Policy doctoral fellow.

Atlantic | A new analysis by Christopher Wimer PhD 2007, Sophie Collyer, and Xavier Jaravel suggests not only  that rising prices have been quietly taxing low-income families more heavily than rich ones, but also that, after accounting for that trend, the American poverty rate is significantly higher than the official measures suggest.

Wimer received his PhD in Sociology & Social Policy from Harvard in 2007 and is now Co-Director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy (CPSP) at Columbia University. Xavier Jaravel received his PhD in Business Economics from Harvard in 2016 and is now Assistant Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. Jaravel's research on inflation inequality—showing that prices have risen more quickly for people at the bottom of the income distribution than for those at the top—which informs their analysis of the poverty rate, appears in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (May 2019).

View the brief: The Costs of Being Poor ►
View the research: Quarterly Journal of Economics  ►

LSE American Politics and Policy | A look at Michael Hankinson's American Political Science Review article, co-authored with Justin de Benedictis-Kessner (Boston University), on self-interest, NIMBYism, and the opioids crisis. Michael Hankinson received his PhD in Government & Social Policy in 2017. Their research appears in the Nov 2019 issue of APSR.

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Vox EU | By Timothy J. Layton, Nicole Maestas, Daniel Prinz, and Boris Vabson. Stone PhD Scholar Daniel Prinz is a PhD candidate in Health Policy. Timothy Layton and Nicole Maestas are professors at Harvard Medical School. Boris Vabson is a Seidman Fellow at Harvard Medical School.

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Behavioral Scientist | By Allison Daminger, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy. "Cognitive work is gendered, but not uniformly so," Allison Daminger finds. "And if we want to understand how divisions of cognitive labor impact women, families, and society as a whole, this is a crucial insight." Based on her research, "The Cognitive Dimensions of Household Labor," recently published in the American Sociological Review.

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ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science | By Robert Manduca, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy. Issue on Policy Feedback in an Age of Polarization, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, eds. Learn more about Robert's work:

robertmanduca.com ►

Kellogg Insights | A presidential assassination brought the trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt to power. The episode offers lessons for today’s antitrust regulators. Based on the research of Carola Frydman (PhD 2006) and colleagues Richard Baker and Eric Hilt. Frydman is Professor of Finance in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwester University. 

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Economics for Inclusive Prosperity | By David J. Deming, Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.

Harvard Business Review | By Leslie K. John, Hayley Blunden, and Heidi Liu. Heidi Liu is a PhD candidate in Public Policy and and Inequality & Social Policy PhD Scholar.

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Brookings Institution | By Vanessa Williamson PhD 2015, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

Vox EU | Stefanie Stantcheva, Professor of Economics, discusses her research (joint with Ufuk Akcigit, Santiago Caicedo Soler, Ernest Miguelez, and Valerio Sterzi), "Dancing with the Stars: Innovation Through Interactions," which shows that inventors learn by interacting with other inventors and produce better innovations [Video].

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Washington Center for Equitable Growth
By Robert Manduca, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy. A non-technical summary of Robert Manduca's new paper, "The Contribution of National Income Inequality to Regional Economic Divergence," forthcoming in Social Forces.

... View the research ▶
 

Learn more about Robert Manduca's work
robertmanduca.com

The Hamilton Project | By Will Dobbie (PhD 2013) and Crystal S. Yang (PhD 2013). Will Dobbie is now Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Crystal S. Yang is Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.