Harvard Magazine | Coverage of "Dark and Stormy: Reflections on the Election,” a panel discussion with Harvard faculty members Jill Lepore (Kemper Professor of American History), David Laibson (Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics), and Danielle Allen (Professor of Government and Director of the Safra Center for Ethics), hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center.
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Harvard Crimson | Government professor Danielle Allen, economics professor David Laibson, and History professor Jill Lepore sat down to talk economics, politics, and demographics in the aftermath of President-elect Donald Trump's victory for a panel sponsored by Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center.
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The Boston Globe | Quotes Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology.

Complex | "Can our racism be unlearned? Experts believe perhaps it can, but that work starts with a better understanding of the nation's history." Features Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of Race, History, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

The Nation | Khalil Gibran Muhammad's The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2011) is among the works recommended by Elizabeth Hinton, Assistant Professor of History at Harvard and the author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Harvard University Press, 2016).

MarketWatch | Features Harvard Kennedy School professor Brigitte Madrian on policy measures that would specifically address the solvency of the Social Security system. Madrian was a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) Commission on Retirement Security and Personal Savings, which recently issued the report cited in the article.

The New York Times | Sunday Review column by David Leonhardt highlights new evidence, "among the most rigorous," by Joshua Angrist (MIT), Sarah Cohodes (Ph.D. '15, now Columbia University), Susan Dynarski (University of Michigan), Parag Pathak (MIT), and Christopher Walters (UC Berkeley) showing impressive results from Boston's charter high schools. Among their findings, the article notes that "Boston's charters eliminate one-third to one-half of the white-black test-score gap in a single year."

“Relative to other things that social scientists and education policy people have tried to boost performance—class sizes, tracking, new buildings—these schools are producing spectacular gains,” said Angrist.
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Bloomberg | Immigrants are rapidly closing the gap with longtime Americans, reports Bloomberg, highlighting "one of the most comprehensive studies [of Latino assimilation]  in recent years" by Van C. Tran (Ph.D. '11), Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. The study is co-authored by Nicol Valdez, a doctoral student at Columbia.
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The New York Times | Features research by Ryan D. Enos, Associate Professor of Government, who "simulated the effects of added diversity in white suburbs by hiring Spanish speakers to board commuter trains outside Boston...'There are a lot of things we can experiment on, but context in itself is this widely diffuse and complex thing,' Mr. Enos said. Nailing down how we’re shaped by it, he said, 'is the most impossible problem in social science.'"
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Boston Globe | Features new paper by Sarah Cohodes (Ph.D. '15), Assistant Professor of Education and Public Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University, and co-authors Elizabeth Setren (MIT), and Christopher Walters (UC Berkeley), "Can Successful Schools Replicate?: Scaling Up Boston's Charter School Sector."
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COES-LSE | Michèle Lamont gave the first keynote presentation at the 2016 COES-LSE Inequalities conference, an international conference jointly held by The Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies-COES and the International Inequalities Institute-LSE in Santiago, Chile, November 2-4, 2016. Lamont spoke on Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel, her new book published in September by Princeton University Press. The book is co-authored with a team of sociologists, including former Inequality & Social Policy doctoral fellows Graziella Moraes Silva (Ph.D. '10) and Jessica S. Welburn (Ph.D. '11), as well as Joshua Guetzkow, Nissim Mizrachi, Hanna Herzog & Elisa Reis. Lamont is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and professor of sociology and of African and African American studies at Harvard University.

Boston Globe | Boston Globe editorial urges lifting the charter school cap, citing research by Sarah Cohodes (Ph.D. '15), Assistant Professor of Education and Public Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University, and co-authors Joshua Angrist, Susan Dynarski, Parag Pathak, and Christopher Walter. The research, "Stand and Deliver: Effects of Boston’s Charter High Schools on College Preparation, Entry, and Choice, appears in the Journal of Labor Economics 34,2 (2016).
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Boston Globe | Cites Harvard's Lawrence Katz, Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics, and Alan Krueger of Princeton University, co-authors of a recently released NBER paper, "The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015."
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The New York Times | Quotes Lawrence Katz, Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics."In the 1950s, says Lawrence Katz, a prominent labor economist at Harvard, nearly one-third of the men who went to work after high school were employed in factories. Those jobs and that era are never coming back, Mr. Katz said, 'but a job as a physical therapist or a home health aide doesn’t fit the identity of someone who is a welder or a machinist...I call it an identity mismatch, and I think it’s a huge issue for men,' Mr. Katz said. 'Pure physical labor isn’t much valued today, but we need to try and rebuild the service sector for men without college degrees.'”... Read more about Small Factories Emerge as a Weapon in the Fight Against Poverty

Washington Post | Cites research on employer "upskilling" by Alicia Sasser Modestino (Ph.D. '01), Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Economics at Northeastern University and Associate Director of its Dukakis Center; Daniel Shoag (PhD. '11), Associate Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Joshua Ballance of the Boston Fed. "Upskilling: Do Employers Demand Greater Skill When Workers Are Plentiful."
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The Atlantic | What is lost when disadvantaged students are forced to commodify their backgrounds for the sake of college admissions? A discussion of new book, The Diversity Bargain, by Natasha Warikoo (Ph.D. '05), Associate Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Wall Street Journal | Antoinette Schoar of MIT Sloan writes about her research with Harvard's Sendhil Mullainathan (Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics) and Markus Noeth of Hamburg University. "We sent “mystery shoppers” to financial advisers in the greater Boston area who impersonated regular customers seeking advice on how to invest their retirement savings outside of their 401(k) plans...What we learned is highly troubling."

Times Higher Education | Review of The Diversity Bargain, by Natasha Warikoo (Ph.D. '05), Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "Here, Warikoo explores how such inequalities [in higher education] persist, particularly in relation to students’ understandings of race, meritocracy and inequality in elite universities in the US and the UK. By using the concept of “race frames” (lenses through which we observe, interpret and respond to our world), Warikoo considers the role of family, schooling and history in shaping how we see the world." The Diversity Bargain was just released earlier this month by the University of Chicago Press.

Houston Chronicle | Interview with Ruth López Turley (Ph.D. '01): As the director of Rice University's Houston Education Research Consortium, Ruth López Turley seeks to close socioeconomic gaps in achievement in the Houston Independent School District...The Laredo native and Harvard-educated professor works to strengthen the connection between education research and practice, and founded a network of research institutions and public school districts that have partnered in 13 cities nationwide. Continue reading

Inside Higher Ed | New NBER working paper by faculty member David J. Deming (Harvard Graduate School of Education), Michael Lovenheim (Cornell), and Richard W. Patterson (US Military Academy) finds that growth of fully online degree programs led to increased spending and falling enrollments at some place-based colleges, but had little impact on tuition rates.
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Awardees | Lawrence Katz, Kathryn Edin... Read more about National Academy of Sciences elects new members

Awardee | Celeste Watkins-Hayes (Ph.D. '03)... Read more about Association of Black Sociologists names first Early Career Award recipient

Foreign Affairs | By Douglas W. Elmendorf. "The development and passage of the ACHA is a case study in how not to make public policy," writes Elmendorf. Douglas Elmendorf is Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy. He served as the director of the Congressional Budget Office from January 2009 through March 2015.

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis | Robert Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, joined the inaugural conference of the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute, where he spoke in the opening panel on segregation and inequality. Putnam and Harvard economist Lawrence Katz both serve on the Institute's Board of Advisors.

Why Opportunity and Inclusion Matter to America's Economic Strength
Lael Brainard of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors delivered the keynote address, highlighting issues of employment, household financial health, the geography of opportunity, and affordable housing. She also drew attention to insights generated by the Boston Fed's Workng Cities Challenge.
View text of remarks
 

Earlier this spring Governor Brainard delivered the 2017 Malcolm Wiener Lecture in International Political Economy in the JFK Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School.

Harvard Kennedy School PolicyCast | Professor David Deming (PhD '10) sits down with PolicyCast host Matt Cadwallader to talk about his new Harvard Kennedy School course, The Causes and Consequences of Inequality (SUP-206). If traditional jobs like manufacturing aren’t coming back, how can the economy adapt? How can the American education system better prepare the next generation for the needs of the modern economy? Deming's research grapples with these questions.

Harvard Gazette | This past fall, Harvard President Drew Faust convened a University-wide task force to examine ways to help Harvard thrive as a place where all members of its increasingly diverse community feel that they truly belong. The task force is co-chaired by James Bryant Conant University Professor Danielle Allen, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics; Harvard Kennedy School Academic Dean Archon Fung, the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship; and Vice President for Campus Services Meredith Weenick.

The task force’s co-chairs recently sat down with the Harvard Gazette to discuss this report, their first year, and what’s next for this important work.

U.S. Congress Joint Economic Commitee | Professors Robert D. Putnam and Mario L. Small (PhD '01), joined by Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute and Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs, testified before the Joint Economic Committee on the potential role for social capital in addressing U.S. economic and social challenges.

Robert Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, focused on two generational concerns: why social capital matters in narrowing the opportunity gap among today's children, and what a boomer generation "aging alone" portends for U.S. eldercare costs in the years ahead.
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Mario Small, Grafstein Family Professor of Sociology, discussed the evidence that "early education and childcare programs may be an especially effective venue to help low-income parents generate social capital,"..." that this social capital is beneficial, and that there is reason to believe that targeted interventions may help such programs maximize these benefits."
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Gov Innovator Podcast | Andy Feldman (PhD '07) interviews Carrie Conaway (AM '01), Chief Strategy and Research Officer for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Conaway was recently appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Board for Education Sciences. Feldman is currently a visiting fellow with the Center for Children and Families at the Brookings Institution.

The 74 | Professor David Deming (PhD '10) on the lasting benefits of Head Start, school accountability, and integration. Deming is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The New York Times Magazine
By Matthew Desmond, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences.
 

Scholars Strategy Network | By Nathan Wilmers, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology

Scholars Strategy Network | by Christopher Jencks

Scholars Strategy Network | by Amy E. Lerman and Vesla M. Weaver (Ph.D. '07)

Brookings Institution | By Elisabeth Jacobs (Ph.D. '08)

Scholars Strategy Network | by Bruce Western

Scholars Strategy Network | by Laura M. Tach (Ph.D. '10)

Scholars Strategy Network | by Alix Gould-Werth and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez (Ph.D. candidate in Government & Social Policy).

Scholars Strategy Network | by Ann Owens (Ph.D. '12)