The Economist | Cites research by Joshua Goodman (HKS), Julia Melkers (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Amanda Pallais (Harvard Economics). A summary of their study, "Can Online Delivery Increase Access to Education?", can be found in NBER Digest.
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The New York Times | David Brooks column cites research by Amitabh Chandra, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy (joint with Amy Finkelstein of MIT, Adam Sacarny of Columbia, and Chad Syverson of Chicago Booth), summarized in their recent piece in Harvard Business Review, "Perhaps Market Forces Do Work in Health Care After All."

Yet, as Chandra pointed out, in other work, he and colleagues also found that people struggle to be good 'consumers'  with high-deductible health plans, contrary to his expectation before conducting the research. That study (joint with Zarek Brot-Goldberg, Benjamin Handel, and Jonathan Holstad, all of UC Berkeley) was the subject of Margot Sanger-Katz column in The New York Times last year.

Quartz | Discusses findings of a new study by Harvard economists Alberto Alesina, Stefanie Stantcheva, and Edoardo Teso (Ph.D. candidate in Politial Economy and Government). Stantcheva will be presenting this work, "Intergenerational Mobility and Support for Redistribution," in the Harvard Inequality Seminar, Feb 13, 2017.
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Fast Company | Digs into new study by Harvard economists Alberto Alesina, Stefanie Stantcheva, and Edoardo Teso (Ph.D. candidate in Political Economy and Government), "Intergenerational Mobility and Support for Redistribution."

Across the U.S. as a whole, Americans overestimate the probability of making it from the bottom quintile to the top quintile by almost 50%. The actual probability is that 7.8 kids out of 100 will do it, but we believe the probability to be on average to be 11.4 kids. It "seems that information about mobility has not yet made its way into people’s minds, given that both left- and right-wing respondents still overestimate mobility in the U.S.," says Stefanie Stantcheva, one of the authors, in an email. She says the higher perception-actuality gaps in the South could be explained by higher rates of "income segregation"—that is, that richer and poorer people tend to live further apart.

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The New York Times | "The rise of automation...has prompted an intense debate among economists and some policy makers about just what society and especially government owes these workers. One place to start, [Harvard economist] Lawrence Katz said, would be for the government to provide more funding for retraining and also develop a wage insurance program to cover differences in salaries as workers migrate to new, lower-paid jobs from disappearing, higher-paid ones."

FiveThirtyEight | Features Todd Rogers, Associate Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Brigitte Madrian, Aetna Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management, who are parties to an amicus brief to the Supreme Court concerning a New York state law banning surcharges on credit card purchases while permitting discounts for cash transactions—and how the law should take into account the insights of behavioral economics.

The New York Times | Discusses several new papers presented at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association, including an online minimum wage experiment by John J. Horton (Ph.D. '11), Assistant Professor at NYU Stern School of Business, and a study by Michael Luca of HBS (joint with Dara Luca of Mathematica Policy Research), which examined the impact of the minimum wage on restaurant exit.

Inside Higher Ed | Reporting from the American Historical Association's 131st annual meeting in Denver, January 5-8. Quoted: Professors Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Leah Wright Rigueur of the Harvard Kennedy School. Muhammad participated in an opening plenary panel, "The First 100 Days: Priority for a New President."

Politifact | Edward L. Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, is interviewed for Politifact's Obameter series, which tracks the record of President Barack Obama.

“In general, the response to the Great Recession was forceful but sensible,” said Edward Glaeser, a Harvard University economist. “There were few massive mistakes on his watch.”

On housing policy: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant mortgage-sector players whose troubles exacerbated the housing crash and the subsequent recession, “remain unreformed” as part of Obama’s response to the housing crisis, said Harvard’s Glaeser.

The Atlantic—CityLab | Oscar Boyson’s documentary, The Future of Cities, is a jet-setting look at problems and solutions in cities centers across the world. The 18-minute film, which features Harvard's Edward L. Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, accompanies the article.

The Atlantic—CityLab | Features recent study of 72 U.S. mayors by Katherine Levine Einstein (Ph.D. '12) and David Glick, both Assistant Professors of Political Science at Boston University. Their article, "Mayors, Partisanship, and Redistribution," appears in Urban Affairs Review.
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Politifact | Devah Pager, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy and Director of the Inequality & Social Policy program, is interviewed for Politifact's Obameter series, which tracks the record of President Barack Obama.

Harvard sociologist Devah Pager said it is difficult to evaluate progress on ex-offender employment because there isn't solid, broad data on the employment of people with criminal records. The available data is limited in scope.

"There are some evaluation studies that suggest prison-to-work programs can have substantial effects," she said.

The New York Times | Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard, has a term for this: “retrospective wait unemployment,” or “looking for the job you used to have.”

“It’s not a skill mismatch, but an identity mismatch,” he said. “It’s not that they couldn’t become a health worker, it’s that people have backward views of what their identity is.”

Vox—The Weeds Podcast | Vox's Sarah Kliff and Matt Yglesias dive deep into early work by Amitabh Chandra, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy, to offer tax wonk tips about when to time your child's birth [begins 41:40 mark]. Prospective parents can check out the research, "Taxes and the Timing of Birth" (joint with Stacy Dickert‐Conlin), in the Journal of Political Economy (1999). 
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Brookings Institution | Martin West (Ph.D. '06), Associate Professor of Education, hosted a Brookings Institution forum with Arne Duncan (U.S. Secretary of Education, 2009-2015), Lindsay Fryer of the Penn Hill Group, and Gerard Robinson of the American Enterprise Institute. Video and transcript available.

The American Conservative | Profile of George J. Borjas, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.

Wall Street Journal | Cites Harvard Kennedy School Professor Brigitte Madrian, who notes that in the aggregate, 401(k) participants under the age of 55 withdraw 30 to 40 cents from their retirement accounts for every dollar contributed. One reason: Many 401(k) participants liquidate their accounts when they switch employers, paying income taxes and a 10% penalty in many cases. Discusses proposed policy remedies.

Pro Publica | Is it possible to create a criminal risk score formula "that is equally predictive for all races without disparities in who suffers the harm of incorrect predictions?" Pro Publica explains why "four groups of scholars, working separately and using different methodologies, all reached the same conclusion. It's not."

Discusses work on this problem by Jon Kleinberg (Cornell), Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard), and Manish Raghavan (Cornell), "Inherent Tradeoffs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores."
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U.S. News and World Report | Quotes Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Washington Post | Interview with behavioral scientist Todd Rogers, Associate Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, "Artful Paltering: The Risks and Rewards of Using Truthful Statements to Mislead Others." The study is co-authored by Richard Zeckhauser (HKS), Francesca Gino (HBS), Michael I. Norton (HBS), and Maurice E. Schweitzer (University of Pennsylvania).
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Awardee| Deirdre Bloome (Ph.D. '14, now University of Michigan) is one of seven New Scholar grant recipients selected by Stanford's Center on Poverty and Inequality. Bloome will investigate (1) to what extent intragenerational and intergenerational income mobility contribute to lifetime income inequality, (2) how these contributions have changed across recent birth cohorts, and (3) whether these differ across people from low- and high-income backgrounds—with an eye to understanding "how income mobility over the life course relates to income inequality between people."

William T. Grant Foundation | Faculty member Matthew Desmond is one of ten finalists for the William T. Grant Foundation Scholars program, which supports early career researchers in the social, behavioral, and health sciences. Four to six Scholars will be selected in March 2016 for these five-year research awards.

Congratulations to Anthony Abraham Jack (Ph.D. candidate in Sociology), who has been selected to join the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow in the 2016-19 cohort. The Harvard  Society of Fellows recognizes the ‘highest caliber of intellectual achievement’ from any field of study, awarding three-year postdoctoral fellowships to twelve new Junior Fellows each year. Learn more about Anthony Jack at his homepage▶

Awardee | Ariel R. White (Ph.D. candidate in Government) has been selected one of eight Harvard Horizons Scholars for 2016—"PhD students whose ideas, innovations, and insights have the potential to reshape their disciplines." Ariel will present her research, Voter Behavior in the Shadow of Punitive Policies, at a university-wide symposium to be held in Sanders Theater on April 5, 2016. Read more about her work ►

Event [video] | Claudia Goldin delivered the eighth annual Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture at Columbia University on "Career and Family: Collision or Confluence?" Christopher Flinn (NYU) and Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia) served as discussants. See the video ▶

The Economist | Robert Putnam's, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, described as "thoughtful and persuasive", has been selected by The Economist as one of the best books of 2015.  Also making the list, Inequality: What Can Be Done?, by Anthony Atkinson (University of Oxford).

Awardees | Stefanie Stantcheva and Alberto Alesina (Harvard Economics) are the recipients of a Russell Sage Foundation grant to examine how perceptions of social mobility affect support for different types of redistributive policies.

Awardee Brendan Saloner (Ph.D '12)

American Academy of Arts & Sciences [video] | Roland Fryer, a newly-elected member in the 235th class of Fellows,  addressed the group as the Class III speaker, representing the social sciences at the American Academy's 2015 Induction Ceremony.  View his address (15 minutes).

Awardee | Robert D. Putnam to receive the Institute for Advanced Studies' (University of Bologna) highest honor for scientific excellence and international acclaim.

Awardee | Michael Hankinson, Ph.D. candidate in Government & Social Policy.... Read more about Michael Hankinson awarded TESS and JCHS grants to investigate political behavior and the housing affordability crisis

Harvard Gazette | Matthew Desmond, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences. Learn more about his work: 
MacArthur Fellow profile ▶

Awardee | Matthew Desmond. View MacArthur Fellow profile ▶

Awardee | Dan Zuberi (Ph.D. '04) has been named to the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) College, which represents "the emerging generation of scholarly, scientific and artistic leadership in Canada." Zuberi, now RBC chair and Associate Professor of Social Policy at the University of Toronto's School of Public Policy and Governance, was recognized for his "innovative social policy research" on vulnerable and disadvantaged populations in Canada and the U.S.  (Read the full citation)

Awardee | Viridiana Rios (Ph.D. '13) will be a visiting fellow this fall at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, where she will be working on a project titled, "Economic Policy for Crime Deterrence in Mexico."

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

Awardee | Michèle Lamont. Canada's highest honor a scholar can achieve in the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences.

Politico Magazine | Robert Putnam recognized as one of fifty "thinkers, doers, and visionaries transforming American politics in 2015."

Awardee | Daniel Hopkins (Ph.D. '07)... Read more about Daniel Hopkins wins APSA awards in Urban Politics and Political Methodology

Awardee | Sendhil Mullainathan and co-authors Anandi Mani (University of Warwick), Eldar Shafir (Princeton), and Jiaying Zhao (University of British Columbia) recognized for their article, "Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function," Science 341 (6149): 976-980.

Radio Open Source | Harvard's Mary Waters, John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology, and Roberto Gonzales, Assistant Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, join Daniel Kanstroom, Professor of Law at Boston College and author of  Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History.

From Radio Open Source:
Mary Waters, sociologist at Harvard, is increasingly concerned by the parallels between mass deportation and mass incarceration. She termed the phenomenon “crimmigration.” In order to resist this system, she writes, “we need a model of a social movement that is not based in civil rights, because we have defined millions of people living in this country as being outside of civil society.“

Roberto Gonzales spent 12 years following the lives of undocumented teenagers in Los Angeles. His heart-breaking account in Lives in Limbo paints a tragic portrait of squandered potential and unrealized dreams. For undocumented teenagers, adulthood marks a transition to illegality — a period of ever-narrowing opportunities. One teenager named Esperanza lamented to Roberto: “I would have been the walking truth instead of a walking shadow.”

EdNext Podcast | Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick has been poring over Neil Gorsuch’s opinions as a federal judge to learn how he might approach the steady stream of education cases that inevitably make their way before the Supreme Court. He discusses his conclusions in this week's episode with Marty West, Associate Professor of Education  and executive edtor of Education Next.

C-SPAN Book TV | Professor Natasha Warikoo talks about her book The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities, in which she examines what college students in the U.S. and Britain think about race and diversity programs. A presentation delivered at New York University by Natasha Warikoo (Ph.D. '05), Associate Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Politico | By Theodore R. Johnson and Leah Wright Rigueur. "In the tenous relationship between Republican leaders and historically black schools, this is the way it's been for a long time," write Johnson and Rigueur. "Politics makes for strange bedfellows—as is undoubtedly true of Trump and Talladega—but the blend of political expediency and areas of ideological overlap have proved a strong enough elixir to bring the two together and sustain a relationship over time."

Leah Wright Rigueur is an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power. Theodore R. Johnson is an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

Harvard Gazette | Featuring interviews with Bart Bonikowski, Associate Professor of Sociology, and Michèle Lamont,  Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies.

The New York Times
By George J. Borjas, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.

The New York Times | By Sendhil Mullainathan, Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics.

Vox | By David Cutler, John Bertko, and Topher Spiro. David Cutler is Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University. John Bertko is the chief actuary for Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange. Topher Spiro is the vice president for health policy at the Center for American Progress.

Brookings Institution | By Nora Gordon (Ph.D. '02), Associate Professor of Public Policy, Georgetown University.

Real Clear Policy | By Robert Doar and Andrew Feldman (Ph.D. '07). Feldman is a Visiting Fellow in the Center on Children and Families in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution and a researcher with the Evidence-Based Policymaking Collaborative. Robert Doar is currently a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Scientific American | By Edward L. Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics. "In fact, the crush of people living in close quarters fosters the kind of collaborative creativity that has produced some of humanity's best ideas, including the industrial revolution and the digital age. In the years ahead such collaborations can be expected to help solve the world's most pressing problems—poverty, energy shortages, climate change—and to promote fundamental political transitions," writes Glaeser....

Education Next | By Thomas J. Kane, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research. Between 2008 and 2012, Kane was deputy director for K-12 research at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

NPR's On Point | Among the guests, Vanessa Williamson (Ph.D. '15), a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and co-author, with Theda Skocpol, of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Washington Post | By Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. "We need a Cleisthenic moment," is the thought on Allen's mind, referring to the faltering and then recovery of Athenian democracy in ancient Greece as Athenians rose up against the tyrant Peisistratos. The takeaway from Cleisthenic moment? "The Athenians reorganized their political institutions to ensure connections among rural, urban and coastal populations," an essential task if America is to secure liberty and justice for all, Allen writes.

CNN | By Vanessa Williamson (Ph.D. '15), Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Williamson is the author of the forthcoming book Read My Lips: Why Americans are Proud to Pay Taxes (Princeton University Press, 2017), and co-author with Theda Skocpol of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republian Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2012).

The Guardian | Sociologist Matthew Desmond on the genesis of Evicted, his acclaimed book about those affected by the eviction epidemic in the US.

The Guardian | Soaring rents and low wages have hit the poorest families in the US hard. Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond introduces an extract from his heartbreaking book about the crisis.

Project Syndicate | By Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, Harvard Kennedy School.

Harvard Kennedy School Magazine
Still fresh from the political earthquake of 2016, leading experts at the Harvard Kennedy School came together to assess the new landscape in a series of roundtables in November. Surveying the economy and social policy: Doug Elmendorf, Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School; David Ellwood, Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy and Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, and Brigitte Madrian, Aetna Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management.

Harvard Gazette | Harvard historian looks to the past, using case study method to suggest that dogged disputes can strengthen democracy. Interview with David Moss, Paul Whiton Cherington Professor at Harvard Business School and author of a new book, Democrcy: A Case Study (Harvard University Press, 2017).

Brookings Institution—The Brown Center Chalkboard | By Martin R. West (Faculty, Ph.D. '06)

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

Congressional testimony| Testimony of  Scott Winship (Ph.D. '09) before Subcommittee on Human Resources, Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives.

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston | By Alicia Sasser Modestino (Ph.D. '01), Daniel Shoag (Ph.D. '11), and Joshua Ballance

Usable Knowledge (HGSE) | Interview with Ron Ferguson

The Journalist's Resource | Katherine Levine Einstein (Ph.D. '12)

Global Development Network | By Dan Honig, Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy. Award-winning essay of GDN Next Horizons Essay Competition.

Congressional Testimony | Testimony of Justin Wolfers (Ph.D. '01) before Committee on Finance, U.S. Senate.

Washington Center for Equitable Growth | By Elisabeth Jacobs

Scholars Strategy Network | By Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol

Brookings Institution—The Brown Center Chalkboard | By Matthew M. Chingos and Martin R. West (Faculty, Ph.D. '06)

Scholars Strategy Network | By Theda Skocpol

Poverty and Race Research Action Council | By Eva Rosen (Ph.D. '14)

Brookings Institution—The Brown Center Chalkboard | By Martin R. West (Faculty, Ph.D. '06)

Journalist's Resource | William Julius Wilson, Robert Sampson

Washington Center for Equitable Growth | By Elisabeth Jacobs

Boston University Initiative on Cities | By Katherine Levine Einstein (Ph.D. '12) and David M. Glick

Scholars Strategy Network | by Judith Scott-Clayton (Ph.D. '09)

Scholars Strategy Network | By Jackelyn Hwang, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology & Social Policy.

Journalist's Resource | Joshua Goodman