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.
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.

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)
View the research

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."
View the research

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."
View the research

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. ...

National Academy of Sciences | Mary C. Waters chaired the national panel of experts who wrote the 520-page report, which is to be published by The National Academies Press. View the Report in Brief (6 pp) ► 

Washington Center for Equitable Growth | By Elisabeth Jacobs (Ph.D. '08)

Social and Behavioral Sciences Team | Daniel Hopkins (Ph.D. '07)... Read more about Daniel Hopkins serves as fellow with White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team

Brookings Institution—Brown Center Chalkboard | By Ann Owens (Ph.D. '12)

Harvard Kennedy School: Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston | By Anthony A. Braga (Rutgers) and David M. Hureau (Ph.D. candidate in Sociology & Social Policy). This Policy Brief draws directly from the forthcoming article, Anthony A. Braga and David M. Hureau. 2015. “Strong Gun Laws Are Not Enough: The Need for Improved Enforcement of Secondhand Gun Transfer Laws in Massachusetts.” Preventative Medicine 79 (October) 37-42. ►

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

Washington Center for Equitable Growth | By Elisabeth S. Jacobs (Ph.D. '08)

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

Brookings Institution—Brown Center Chalkboard | By Thomas J. Kane and Miriam Greenberg

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.

Congressional testimony | Testimony of Judith Scott-Clayton (Ph.D. '09) before the  U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Full committee hearing on Reauthorizing the Higher Education Act. 

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)

Pediatrics | By Brendan Saloner (Ph.D. '12), Emma E. McGinty, and Colleen L. Barry.  The direct link to the article requires institutional subscription, but an excellent summary may be found at  JHU Hub.

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