The New York Times | New research linking millions of fathers and sons dating to the 1880s shows that children of poor immigrants in America have had greater success climbing the economic ladder than children of similarly poor fathers born in the United States. That pattern has been remarkably stable for more than a century. The findings, published in a working paper by a team of economic historians including Leah Platt Boustan PhD 2006, challenge several arguments central to the debate over immigration in America today.  Boustan is now Professor of Economics at Princeton University.

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NBC News | Interview with Ruth López Turley PhD 2001, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Houston Education Research Consortium at Rice University.

"Almost 10 years ago, when I was promoted with tenure, I reflected on all the research I had produced up to that point... Even though I had been at some of the nation’s top research universities, none of my work changed anything for anyone, which was the whole reason I got into this line of work in the first place. I began to connect with colleagues who were working in partnerships between universities and local school districts in other cities. That’s when I came to Rice University for a fresh start and to develop this partnership research model in Houston."

Learn more about Ruth López Turley | Pursuing Educational Equity ►

Harvard Gazette | To follow the career of William Julius Wilson is to trace the evolution of the national conversation on race and class in American over the past half century.

That was the overarching theme of a three-day symposium celebrating the career of the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor Emeritus.

Professor Wilson has been an extraordinary influence to the many Harvard PhD students he advised since joining the faculty in 1996. He was one of the four founders—together with colleagues Katherine Newman, David Ellwood, and Christopher Jencks—of the Inequality & Social Policy program in 1998, and he has taught many of the nearly 300 PhD students who have come through the program since.

View symposium program + video ►

Boston Globe | Features research by Kelley Fong, PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy, and Sarah Faude of Northeastern University.

"Two researchers from Harvard and Northeastern universities raised alarms last year about inequities in Boston’s school assignment system. After examining late registrations, the researchers concluded 'nearly half of black kindergartners miss the first registration deadline, a rate almost three times higher than their white peers, consigning them to the least preferred schools.'

“'We find that late registration is highly stratified, disproportionately experienced by black and Hispanic children as well as children living in lower-income neighborhoods,” the authors, Kelley Fong and Sarah Faude, wrote."

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scholar.harvard.edu/kfong ►

CityLab | Features a recent study by Leah Platt Boustan PhD 2006 and colleagues Philipp Ager and Katherine Eriksson, "The Intergenerational Effects of a Large Wealth Shock: White Southerners After the Civil War." Boustan is now Professor of Economics at Princeton University.

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Harvard Ed. Magazine | Ann Mantil EdD 2018 conducts first formal study of 50-year-old school integration program. Ann Mantil is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Education at Brown University.

Vox | New research by Nathaniel Hendren and Benjamin Spring-Keyser finds that investing in kids can have huge benefits. Hendren is Professor of Economics and a founding Co-Director of Opportunity Insights. Sprung-Keyser is a PhD candidate in Economics at Harvard.

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The Nation | Bryce Covert reviews Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States — and the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2019). Alex received his PhD in Government & Social Policy in 2016 and is now Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

MIT Ideas Made to Matter | Interview with Nathan Wilmers PhD 2018, now Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies at MIT Sloan School of Management. 

Wall Street Journal | A new study by Harvard economists Nathaniel Hendren and Ben Sprung-Keyser examines 133 policy changes over the past half century and finds that programs for low-income children return taxpayer dollars over time. Hendren is Professor of Economics and a founding Co-Director of Opportunity Insights. Spring-Keyser is a PhD candidate in Economics at Harvard.

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The New York Times | Coverage of research by economics professor Stefanie Stantcheva (joint with Alberto Alesina and Eduardo Teso), "Intergenerational Mobility and Support for Redistirbution," first presented in the Inequality Seminar in spring 2017 and subsequently published in the American Economic Review. Also higlights the Opportunity Atlas and findings by Raj Chetty, John Friedman of Brown University, and Nathaniel Hendren of Opportunity Insights.

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Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) | Stone PhD Scholars Alex Albright (Economics) , Nicholas Short (Government & Social Policy), and Oren Danieli PhD'19 (Business Economics) have been selected to present papers at the eighth meeting of Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) at the Paris School of Economics, July 3-5, 2019.

Keynote speakers: Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard University, Marianne Bertrand of University of Chicago, and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics.

... View program and papers ►

Barron's | New research from Adrien Auclert of Stanford University, Will Dobbie of Harvard University, and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham of Yale University suggests that [a 2005 law discouraging Americans from filing for bankruptcy] worsened the downturn [in the Great Recession]  and hampered the recovery. Will Dobbie PhD 2013 is a Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

Harvard Law Today | Profile of Crystal Yang, who has been promoted to full professor at Harvard Law School. Yang received her JD and PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2013. Her teaching and research focus on empirical law and economics, particularly in the areas of criminal justice, consumer bankruptcy, and immigration and welfare policy.

The New Yorker | "The lasting beauty of  [Anthony Abraham Jack's] ethnography is that it gives a voice to the students who, as his research ends up revealing, most need it," writes Eren Orbey about The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disdvantaged Students (Harvard University Press, 2019). Anthony Jack received his PhD in Sociology and 2016 and is now Assistant Professor of Education at Harvard and a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.

ABA Journal | Coverage of forthcoming article by Stone PhD Scholar Brian Libgober, PhD '18, "Getting a Lawyer While Black: A Field Experiment." Brian earned his AM in Statistics and PhD in Government from Harvard University, and his JD from the University of Michigan. He is now a postdoctoral associate and lecturer in political science at Yale University, 2018-2020.

...View the research ►

... Read more about Michael Hankinson: APSA Susan Clarke Young Scholar Award in Urban Politics

... Read more about Ashley Craig: International Institute of Public Finance Young Economist Award 2020

Awardees | Deirdre Bloome (PhD 2014), Shauna Dyer, and Harvard faculty member Xiang Zhou are the recipients of the James Coleman Award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Education for their article, "Educational Inequality, Educational Expansion, and Intergenerational Income Persistence in the United States," published in the American Sociolgical Review. Deirdre Bloome (PhD 2014) is now an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. Xiang Zhou is Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University.

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Awardee | Stone PhD Scholar Allison Daminger, a PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy, is a 2020 recipient (co-winner) of the Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association's Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section for her article, "The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor," published in the American Sociological Review.

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... Read more about Deirdre Bloome: ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility 2020 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award

AAPSS | Mario L. Small, Grafstein Family Professor of Sociology at Harvard, is one of five distinguished scholars to be inducted as Fellows of the American Academy of Political and Social Science at a ceremony to be held in Washington, D.C., on October 8, 2020.

Awardee | Christina J. Cross, Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard and Assistant Professor of Sociology (beginning 2021),  has been awarded a 2019 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award by the University of Michigan for her doctoral dissertation, The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance. The award is "given in recognition of the most exceptional scholarly work produced by doctoral students at the University of Michigan."

Russell Sage Foundation | Asad L. Asad PhD 2017 has been awarded a Russell Sage Foundation Presidential Authority grant for a study titled, "Precarious Citizenship: Judicial Decisions in U.S. Denaturalization Cases." Asad is now Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stanford University.

IZA - Institute of Labor Economics | Lawrence F. Katz, the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard, will receive the 2020 IZA Prize in Labor Economics for his 35 years of research documenting changes in earnings inequality and showing the role of the expansion of educational opportunity in increasing living standards. The IZA Prize is regarded as the most prestigious science award in the field. 

“Lawrence Katz is universally recognized in the world of economics as a remarkably imaginative and productive scholar, who combines profound economic research with an interest in current basic and specific issues of public policy. Most important, the same recognition is given to his decency in dealing with other economists, especially junior researchers," read the award statement.

Lawrence Katz has advised more than 200 Harvard PhD students to date—among them, over 40 faculty and alumni of the Inequality & Social Policy program.

View the list ►

Awardee | Harvard Kennedy School Professor Marcella Alsan and co-author Marianne Wanamaker of the University of Tennesee accepted the 27th Kenneth J. Arrow Award for best paper in health economics at this week's Allied Social Sciences Association meetings in San Diego. The award, given by International Health Economics Association, recognized their paper, "Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men," published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2018.

"The Arrow Award Committee is proud to acknowledge the authors of this innovative and informative paper, which examines the extent to which the infamous Tuskegee Study of untreated syphilis in black males reduced trust in the medical system and ultimately impeded the progress in reducing mortality for this group...The results provide robust evidence that disclosure of the Tuskegee Study undermined trust in the medical system with the strongest effects for those black males for whom the study was most salient. This led to reductions in the use of medical care and increases in mortality for the most affected group. Specifically, the estimates imply that life expectancy for 45-year old black men fell by up to 1.5 years, an amount sufficient to explain approximately one-third of the racial gap in life expectancy in 1980. We congratulate the authors on the publication of this important paper."

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Awardee | Harvard Professor of Education Jal Mehta PhD 2006 and collaborator Sarah Fine EdD 2017  have won the 2020 Grawemeyer Award in Education for ideas set forth in their book, In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School (Harvard University Press, 2019). 

The Grawemeyer Awards, based at the University of Louisville, pay tribute to the power of creative ideas, emphasizing the impact that a single idea can have on the world. Five awards are given annually to reward outstanding ideas in music composition, world order, psychology, education, and religion, each carrying a prize of $100,000. The 2020 winners will visit Louisville in April to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

Awardee | Sarah E. James, PhD candidate in Government & Social Policy, has been recognized by the Harvard Government Department with two teaching awards: Sarah is one of four recipients of the inaugural Sidney Verba Award for Teaching Excellence and the inaugural recipient of the department's Peer Mentoring Award. Learn more about Sarah James's work:

sarahejames.com ►

Berkman Klein Center | Cierra Robson, a PhD student in Sociology and Social Policy, has been selected as a 2020 Assembly Student Fellow by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The Assembly Student Fellowship program brings together a cohort of Harvard students from a range of disciplines and schools to participate in problem-oriented seminars led by Harvard faculty and collaborate on student-led projects aimed at tackling real-world problems. This year, Assembly is taking up disinformation in the digital public sphere from a cybersecurity perspective.

Broadly, Cierra is interested in how technological advancements both reinforce and revolutionize the American racial order, as well as how public-private collaborations both solidify and make profitable existing power hierarchies. She aims to use her research to conceptualize what meaningful regulation of Big Tech looks like.

Vanity Fair | Stefanie Stantcheva, Professor of Economics at Harvard, is featured as one of this year's 50 most influential French people in the world. Also selected: MIT economist and 2019 Nobel Prize winner Esther Duflo.

Russell Sage Foundation | Alumni Michael Hankinson (PhD in Government & Social Policy, 2017), Sarah Halpern-Meekin (PhD in Sociology & Social Policy, 2019), and Nathan Wilmers (PhD in Sociology, 2018) are among the fall 2019 recipients of RSF Presidential Authority grants in the area of Social, Political, and Economic Inequality.

Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning | Andrew Keefe, JD/PhD student in  Sociology and Social Policy, is a recipient—together with Harvard College Lecturer Shai M. Dromi and Sociology PhD student Kwan Woo Kim—of a 2018-19 ABLConnect Teaching Innovator Prize for their work in Dr. Dromi's course, "Visualizing Humanitarian Crises and Interventions." 

ABLConnect is an online database of active learning exercises developed by Harvard instructors and used in Harvard classrooms. The competitive Teaching Innovator Prize recognizes instructors from across Harvard institutions for their use of active learning.

Awardee | Ronald Ferguson, Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and faculty director of the university-wide Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI), was honored for his work in founding Boston Basics by Join Us for Good, Eastern Bank's charitable foundation. The Boston Basics Campaign was inspired by the fact that 80% of brain growth happens in the first three years of life and is now spreading to other cities in a Basics National Network.

Boston Basics ▶

Harvard Graduate School of Education | Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Martin West PhD 2006 has been named the William Henry Bloomberg Professor at Harvard.  The professorship supports a rotating series of scholars and practitioners who teach and conduct research in the fields of philanthropic policy and practice, public service and volunteerism, and the effective leadership and management of nonprofit and public institutions.

Awardee | Anthony Abraham Jack PhD 2016 has been awarded the 2019 Association for Higher Education CEP Mildred García Award for Exemplary Scholarship (Junior) in recognition of seminal, exemplary scholarship that focuses on research and issues specifically related to underrepresented populations of color. Anthony Abraham Jack received his PhD in Sociology in 2016 and is now Assistant Professor of Education at Harvard and a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.

The Tobin Project | Meredith Dost, PhD candidate in Government and Social Policy and a Stone PhD Research Scholar, is one of nine History of American Democracy Graduate Student Fellows selected by the Tobin Project for her project, "The Effect of Administrative Burden on Political Participation: A Consequence of Federalism." The Tobin Project's graduate student fellows receive research support and the opportunity to receive critical feedback in an interdisciplinary, seminar-style environment.

Project Syndicate | By Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, Harvard Kennedy School. "We necessarily lack data about alternative institutional arrangements that are distant from our current reality...The challenge for economists is to remain true to their mpiricism without crowding out the imagination needed to envisage the inclusive and freedom-enhancing institutions of the future," Rodrik writes.

The Weeds | Boston University's Katherine Levine Einstein (PhD 2012) explains the politics behind America's housing crisis. Einstein received her PhD in Government and Social Policy from Harvard in 2012. She is the author (with David M. Glick and Maxwell Palmer) of the new book Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis (Cambridge University Press, Dec 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.

City Journal | By Alberto Alesina and Stefanie Stantcheva. Americans continue to regard their economic prospects more optimistically than Europeans, who fear that the poor are stuck in poverty. Alesina is the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard. Stantcheva is a Professor of Economics.

The Washington Post | By Leah E. Gose, PhD student in Sociology and Malcolm Hewitt Wiener PhD Scholar in Poverty and Justice. Leah is a contributor to the forthcoming volume, Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance, Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo, eds. (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Washington Post | By Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor.

Boston Globe | By Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra. Amitabh Chandra is the Ethel Zimmerman Wiener Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Henry and Allison McCance Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Katherine Baicker is Dean of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

IMF Finance and Development | Chris Wellisz profiles Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, who sees urbanization as a path to prosperity. Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics.

HKS PolicyCast | With the 2020 census looming, Assistant Professor of Public Policy Benjamin Schneer says redistricting can be made more democratic—even in deeply partisan states [Audio + transcript].

Project Syndicate | By Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy. The rise of populist movements and street protests from Chile to France has made inequality a high priority for politicians of all stripes in the world's rich democracies. But a fundamental question has received relatively little attention: What type of inequality should policymakers tackle?

Boston Review | By Robert Manduca, PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy. In the 1940s and '50s, the general public understood and agreed upon Keynesian economic principles. Today, we can learn a lot from the popularizing efforts that led to that consensus and long-lasting economic success, Robert Manduca argues.

The New York Times | By Christina Cross, Postdoctoral Fellow (2019-2021) and Assistant Professor of Sociology (beginning 2021). New research indicates that access to resources, more than family structure, matters for black kids’ success. "If this is the case, Cross argues, "then what deserves policy attention is not black families’ deviation from the two-parent family model but rather structural barriers such as housing segregation and employment discrimination that produce and maintain racialized inequalities in family life."

Washington Post | By Bart Bonikowski (Associate Professor of Sociology) and Daniel Ziblatt (Eaton Professor of the Science of Government). First in a six-article series edited by Bonikowski and Ziblatt. Inspired by a 2018 academic conference on populism and the future of democracy organized by Harvard Univesity's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs in Talloires, France.

The Globe Post | By Cresa Pugh, PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy. Her research interests include the social legacies of imperialism, ethnic and religious conflict in Southeast Asia, and the role of collective memory and identity in shaping peacebuilding efforts in post-conflict societies.

PIIE | By Olivier Blanchard and Dani Rodrik. What the authors learned from the Combating Inequality conference, held Oct 17-18 at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Olivier Blanchard is the C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Dani Rodrik is the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School.

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The Guardian | By Roberto G. Gonzales and Kristina Brant. As the supreme court considers Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, our research shows multiple benefits for individuals, families and communities.

Roberto Gonzales is professor of education at Harvard University and author of Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America. Kristina Brant is a PhD candidate in Sociology and an Inequality & Social Policy doctoral fellow. Learn more about the report, co-authored with Sayil Camacho and Carlos Aguilar:

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The Immigration Initiative at Harvard ▶

The Atlantic | By Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. See also "Editor's Note: A Nation Coming Apart," which discusses the origins of this special issue of The Atlantic.

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View Editor's Note ▶

The Hill | By Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh (PhD 2004). Andrew Leigh is a member of the Australian Parliament and co-author with Joshua Gans of Innovation + Equality: How to Create a Future That Is More Star Trek Than Terminator (MIT Press, 2019).

Jacobin | An interview with Alexander Keyssar, Matthew W. Stirling, Jr Professor of History and Social Policy and the author of The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.

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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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.

Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, announced the launch of a new initiative - Economics for Inclusive Prosperity (EfIP) - a network of academic economists dedicated to producing creative policy ideas for an inclusive society and economy. Co-directing the initiative are Dani Rodrik, Suresh Naidu of Columbia University, and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley. Download the (free) EfIP eBook: Economics for Inclusive Prosperity: An Introduction and policy briefs.

View the EfIP eBook (pdf) ▶ 
View all policy briefs ▶

Washington Center for Equitable Growth | By Elisabeth Jacobs PhD 2008, Senior Director for Family Economic Security, Washington Center for Economic Growth.

Washington Center for Equitable Growth | By Robert Manduca, PhD candidate in Sociology & Social Policy. This article summarizes findings from “Income Inequality and the Persistence of Racial Economic Disparities” in Sociological Science. 

... View the research ▶

US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty | The US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty is a collaboration of 24 leading scholars, policy experts, and practitioners tasked with answering one big, bold, and exciting question: What would it take to dramatically increase mobility from poverty? This two-year project was funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Co-authored by David T. Ellwood, Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and Nisha G. Patel, Executive Director of the US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, Urban Institute

• Read the press release
• Download the full report
• Watch the overview video