Students

The student in the Public Policy doctoral program pursue a variety of research topics during their time at Harvard.  Below are the current research topics of the Public Policy doctoral candidates.

Current Students and Research Interests

Maria Cecilia Acevedo

Microeconomic foundations of development. Human capital investment, intra-household and spatial allocation of economic activity and market failures that prevent industry development in low and middle income countries.

Mohamad Al-Ississ

Economic and political development of the Middle East; the impact of political instability and violence on investor behavior; competition and regulatory policy; regional conflict in the Middle East; public sector reform; private sector driven growth; and sectarian and ethnic strife.

Sharon Barnhardt

Development economics, education of girls and agricultural child laborers, and human rights in India, and empirical research on a private foundation’s education program which is designed to create incentives for public primary schools and communities to improve enrollment, attendance, and learning quality.

Syon Bhanot

Applications of behavioral and microeconomics. Specific policy areas of interest within this broader field include: household economic behavior, tax policy, development issues, and judgment and decision making. Interest in adjusting existing economic tools and concepts to more accurately model how human beings actually behave in various policy contexts. Research interest also includes promoting the use of evidence-based policy in areas of human rights and development through polling and rigorous econometric methods.

Gabriel Chan

Energy and environmental economics and policy with a focus on climate change policy. Potential areas of research include the interaction of climate policy and international trade policy inducing emission leakage. Research extended to studying energy technology innovation, specifically government research and development policy.

Chris Carrigan

Firm behavior in the context of the legal environment and government regulation. The litigation process and its impact on competition; the role of contract design in subsequent disputes; and firm decision making with government limits on products and services.

Tonya Cropper

Evaluating long-term economic and social impact of criminal justice policies on society, particularly the relationship between juvenile delinquency and education, the effectiveness of juvenile intervention and prevention programs, and the educational, economic, and social impact of a mother's incarceration on her children.

Alexander Culiuc

International development and globalization. Specifically, interested in the impact of outward migration and remittances on development: investment in human and physical capital, trade, macroeconomic stability. Regional interests are in transition economies of South-East Europe and the former USSR.

David Deming

Economics of education, early childhood development, human capital and skill formation, labor economics and program evaluation. (Personal web site)

Will Dobbie

Effect of outside incentives on decision-making, particularly in developing countries. Decision theory, development economics, and behavioral economics and how insights from these fields can be incorporated into more effective policy.

Jeffrey Friedman

Dynamics of military assistance and capacity-building; applications of industrial organization and principal-agent theory to military cooperation; and security studies.

Viral Gandhi

Behavioral decision analysis, inter-temporal choice and cognitive bias. Policy responses to situations where human judgment and decision-making diverge from rational choice theory.

Ina Ganguli

Labor economics, development economics, and program evaluation, with a focus on immigration, education, innovation, and gender issues.

Tara Grillos

Environmental and development economics, evaluation of policies to promote sustainable development and valuation of externalities (eg: ecosystem services that are disrupted due to deforestation).

Marie Gryphon

Education policy with particular interest in ethical implications of education policy and educational freedom and moral and political theory with a focus on professional ethics and the structure of legal systems.

Sounman Hong

How globalization affects the labor market and industrial productivity. The impact of increased trade on wage inequality, and the impact of trade promotion/protection policy on development.

Daniel Honig

Political economy of reform in developing countries, and institutional arrangements and incentives in development. Why do some reforms stick and others fade away? What explains cross-country variation in the mix of aid countries receive, or how some countries become donor darlings while others languish? How can institutional arrangements be redesigned to maximize poverty reduction outcomes?

John Horton

Public sector applications of decision science and contract theory, such as the design of optimal incentives and contracts with the private sector. Especially in applications pertaining to defense and national security.

Mahnaz Islam

Economic development. The impact of school inputs on outcomes such as attendance and performance; the efficacy of micro-credit programs; the relationship between health and education; the influence of nutrition and health on labor marke outcomes.

Brooke Kelsey Jack

Incentives for sustainable community development with a focus on two specific questions. First, how can national and international policies be tailored to local conditions? Second, how can better methods for valuing ecosystem services inform more effective policy?

Avinash Kishore

Energy and environment policy economics for developing countries with a focus on sustainable development in rural areas.

Victoria Levin

Poverty and inequality analysis, as well as the redistributive and poverty-reducing impacts of social protection programs, and intrahousehold allocation of social and other transfers, such as pensions and remittances; the impact of social assistance programs on the quality of human capital and on productivity; applying the tools of behavioral economics to social policy problems - for example, decreased subsidization of education and healthcare in transition economies.

Andrey Liscovich

Development economics, political economy, and behavioral economics.

David Lynch

Political economy of institutions, and how citizens in developing countries react to economic policies through these institutions.

Robyn Meeks

Current research interests include transboundary waters, integrated water resource management, and community resource management.

Suerie Moon

The role of civil society in global economic governance; access to medicines, HIV/AIDS and the pharmaceutical industry; the WTO, globalization and transnational organizing; transparency and accountability in trade negotiations; impact of civil society in combating HIV/AIDS; global social justice campaigns; and legitimacy and governance of NGOs.

Sara Nadel

Microeconomics of international development, particularly applications of behavioral economics or contract theory; and program evaluation of international development policies at the micro level. This includes econometric techniques, particularly applied randomizations

Karl Neumar

Portfolio transformation, asset allocation, public finance.

Philip Osafo-Kwako

Development microeconomics and impact evaluation.

Matthew Ranson

Environmental economics, behavioral economics, and public policy. Research interests include the economic and policy implications of individual decisions that are sub-rational or that are made with limited information--for example, the effects of irrational behaviors on revealed and stated preference estimates of the value of environmental goods.

Gary Reinbold

Law and public policy; empirical analysis of law; game theory and law; poverty, inequality and development; human rights and development.

Christopher Robert

International development, moving beyond the purely financial aspects of economic models and incentive structures, into areas such as multi-attribute utility theory, behavioral economics and happiness. Focus on issues that span the developing world, with regional interest and experience in South and Southeast Asia.

Olga Rostapshova

Climate change policy, econometric modeling, electricity and renewable energy, sustainable development and international environmental legislation.

Santitarn Sathirathai

Finance, banking, macroeconomics, and economic development.

Trisha Shrum

The issues of climate change and energy through the lenses of environmental and behavioral economics. By integrating behavioral economics with existing research on individuals' response to carbon pricing mechanisms, one can better understand how to design the most effective policies that will maximize consumer response while minimizing the additional price burden. This will also lead to a better estimation of carbon mitigation costs

Bill Skimmyhorn

Public and labor economics and applied microeconomic methods of analysis. Study of defense labor policy decisions – both the effects of the policies and the reasons for the policy decisions. Interested in human capital management and behavioral economics as they relate to defense labor policy and this market.

Ariel Dora Stern

Applied microeconomics and policy analysis; financial inclusion in developing countries, particularly micro-insurance; private sector entrepreneurship and innovation and its relationship with public policy; emerging markets/finance.

Richard Sweeney

The intersection of environmental and energy economics and public policy. The choice between market and non-market regulatory mechanisms. While the theoretical justification for government intervention is obviously important, typically drawn towards understanding how specific policies would work in practice. Environmental regulations often overlap with other types of regulation at both the state and federal level, potentially skewing the intended behavioral response. Evaluation of existing policies and quantifying their benefits. (Are solar subsidies worth it? Do state renewable energy standards add anything but bureaucracy? Do efficiency subsidies alter behavior or simply transfer wealth to people who would have consumed efficient goods anyway?)

Climate Change: first, examining ways to design a regulatory mechanism that forces actors to internalize the cost of carbon but also protects certain disadvantaged/politically important groups, such as low-income families or domestic industries that are particularly vulnerable to foreign competition. Second, looking at whether government should rely on push or pull approaches for energy innovation in the face of considerable uncertainty and path dependency. Finally, looking at the role international carbon offsets play in recent US and EU climate plans and evaluating these offsets from both a US and developing world perspective.

Laurence Tai

Interested in sustainable energy in light of global climate change from an environmental economics perspective; policies for the U.S. electricity industry at the state level, because of the role states currently play in regulating this energy source.

Alfie Ulloa

Economic development and forced institutional and legislative convergence; institutional economics, globalization, development issues, and the impact of international affairs on domestic policy outcomes.

Alexandra Van Geen

Judgment and decision making. Experimental econmics, behavioral economics and game theory. Risk aversion. Currently studying the applicability of the assumption that asset integration matters for risk attitude.

Elizabeth Walker

Environmental economics, development economics, and behavioral economics. Research on environmental policies in lesser developed countries, particularly land use and climate change in Africa.

Thomas Wei

The interplay of business and government, how government policies, particularly in the area of economic regulation and antitrust, affect firm behavior, and, subsequently, consumer welfare. Other broad areas of interest include the efficiency of labor markets and the economics of education.

Abby Williamson

Evaluation of how public policy and other interventions impact community connections; particularly how responses to changing ethnic/racial demographics in specific communities affect local social capital; and social networks and public policy.

Maoliang Ye

Economic development; public economics; political economy; and labor economics. Specific topics: social security net, central-local government relationship (fiscal, personnel, etc.), institutional background for economic growth and organization behavior/performance, education reform and formal/informal education.

Andres Zahler

The ways in which firms innovate, their determinants and their effect in enhancing productivity and ultimately growth in the long run. Also interested in the role that public policy and different institutional arrangements can have in successfully overcoming the serious information and coordination failures that arise with innovation, particularly in the private sector.

Tristan Zajonc

Development economics; labor economics; foreign aid policy and aid effectiveness; and education in Pakistan.

Clara Zverina

Political economy, international economics and contract theory. Particularly interested in the effect of a country's contractual environment on vertical integration of multinational enterprises and on technological spillovers to local firms. Also interested in social security reform in post-communist countries. Regional focus is Eastern Europe and, in particular, the Czech Republic.