Stephen Kosack

Assistant Professor of Public Policy
Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation
Office Address
124 Mt. Auburn - Suite 200N-252
Mailing Address
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Mailbox 74
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Contact
Phone: 617-495-8712
Fax: 617-496-4602
Email: Stephen_Kosack@harvard.edu
Assistant
Mary Anne Baumgartner (617-496-7466)
Stephen Kosack

Profile

Stephen Kosack, Assistant Professor of Public Policy,studies comparative politics and political economy. His work focuses on understanding and explaining distributive policymaking in developing countries. He has written on human development, education, civil society, transparency and accountability, foreign aid, foreign-direct investment, and democratic governance in the journals International Organization,Comparative Education,World Development, and theSingapore Economic Review; in two books,The Education of Nations: How the Political Organization of the Poor, Not Democracy, Led Governments to Invest in Mass Education (Oxford University Press, 2012) andFrom the Ground Up: Improving Government Performance with Independent Monitoring Organizations(Brookings Institution Press, 2010; with Charles Griffin and Courtney Tolmie); as well as in a number of policy pieces for organizations like the UNDP and the Brookings Institution. He received his Ph.D. in political science in 2008 from Yale University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Leylan Prize Fellow. Before joining the Kennedy School, he was an economics advisor to the late Senator Ted Kennedy and a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and taught at Brown and the London School of Economics.

Research

For a complete list of faculty citations from 2001 - present, please visit the Harvard Kennedy School Research Report Online.

Selected Publication Citations:

  • Books
    • Kosack, Stephen. The Education of Nations: How the Political Organization of the Poor, Not Democracy, Led Governments to Invest in Mass Education. Oxford University Press, 2012.