FACULTY | STAFF

Social Policy Ph.D. faculty, 2009-2010

:: Core Faculty
Doctoral students work primarily with Core Faculty members drawn from the Government and Sociology departments in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and with the Social Policy faculty of the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

:: Affiliated Faculty
While affiliated faculty from other departments hold no formal advising roles in the program, they may offer courses and research opportunities that contribute to students' training in social policy.

:: Staff
The Ph.D. Programs in Social Policy are administered at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

P r o f i l e s

Mary Jo Bane
Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management
Academic Dean of Kennedy School of Government
Mary Jo Bane is Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management, Academic Dean, and Chair of the Management and Leadership area. From 1993 to 1996 she was Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 1992 to 1993 she was Commissioner of the New York State Department of Social Services, where she previously served as Executive Deputy Commissioner from 1984 to 1986. From 1987 to 1992, at the Kennedy School, she was Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy and Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. She is the author of a number of books and articles on poverty, welfare, families, and the role of churches in civic life. She is currently doing research on poverty in the United States and international context. She lives in Dorchester, Massachusetts, with her husband Kenneth Winston and enjoys hiking, gardening, and reading novels.
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Jason Beckfield
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Jason Beckfield, Assistant Professor of Sociology, is interested in stratification, health, and social policy in the context of economic and political "globalization." His current work focuses on the consequences of European integration for economic inequality among and within the nation-states of Western Europe, and the impact of European integration on national welfare policy and differences among welfare states. Using macro- economic and archival data from 17 countries, this project develops a sociology of regional integration by establishing some of its general effects, distinguishing regionalization from globalization, and building a political-institutional approach that highlights conflict and inequality. His other projects include an analysis of the associational structure and policy effects of international organizations, an examination of the relationship between national income inequality and population health, a study of the world city system (with Arthur S. Alderson), and an investigation of the relationship between economic globalization and the welfare state (with David Brady and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser).
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George J. Borjas
Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy
George Borjas's teaching and research interests focus on the impact of government regulations on labor markets, with an emphasis on the economic impact of immigration. He is the author of Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy; Wage Policy in the Federal Bureaucracy; Friends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigrants on the U.S. Economy; and the textbook Labor Economics. He is also the co-editor of Immigration and the Work Force. Borjas's current research focuses on the economics of immigration and ethnicity. Prior to coming to Harvard, Borjas was a professor of economics at the University of California at San Diego. He has been a consultant to various government agencies and an economic advisor to California Governor Pete Wilson. Borjas received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia.
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Mary C. Brinton
Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology
Professor Mary Brinton's research interests are in gender stratification, labor market organization, education, economic sociology, and Japanese society. She is currently working on a comparative project on the high school-work transition in Japan and the U.S., based on original field research and data collection in Japan. The project uses historical materials, interviews with high school teachers, survey data from employers, and a variety of quantitative data to analyze how the Japanese school-work transition system operates and to assess it from the viewpoints of meritocracy and labor market efficiency. She also continues to work on comparative gender stratification in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan and on the gender and class inequality implications of labor market structures in those countries.
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Amitabh Chandra
Professor of Public Policy
Amitabh Chandra is a Professor of Public Policy. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the IZA Institute in Bonn, Germany, and at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His current research focuses on the effect of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act on labor markets, the role of medical malpractice litigation on the delivery of health care, and the economics of neonatal health and cardiovascular care. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Health Affairs. He is an editor of the journal Economics Letters. He has been a faculty member at Dartmouth and MIT, and has been a consultant to the National Academy of Science, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the RAND Corporation. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Teacher Award , the first-prize recipient of the Upjohn Institute's International Dissertation Research Award, the Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics, and the Eugene Garfield Award for the impact of medical research.
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Pepper Culpepper
Associate Professor of Public Policy
Pepper D. Culpepper, Associate Professor of Public Policy, teaches courses on comparative politics, comparative capitalism, and the doctoral research seminar. He also directs a seminar on European policymaking, which is conducted jointly by the Kennedy School and the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA) in France. His research focuses on the politics of institutional change in the advanced industrial democracies, particularly in Europe. He has authored three books, Creating Cooperation, Changing France, and The German Skills Machine, and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals and edited volumes. At the Kennedy School, Culpepper is affiliated with the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and the Center for Business and Government. He is also a faculty associate of the Center for European Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University and holds degrees from Oxford University and Duke University.
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Kathryn Edin
Professor of Public Policy and Management
Kathryn Edin is Professor of Public Policy and Management at the Kennedy School. Her research focuses on urban poverty and family life, social welfare, public housing, child support, and nonmarital childbearing. Her most recent publication (with Paula England), Unmarried Couples with Children, is an analysis of a four-year study of 50 unmarried couples who shared a birth in 2000. Previous publications include the results of a six-year ethnographic study in eight Philadelphia neighborhoods, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage (with Maria J. Kefalas), and Making Ends Meet: How Low Income Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low Wage Work (with Laura Lein). Her next book is tentatively titled Marginal Men: Fatherhood in the Lives of Low Income Unmarried Men (with Timothy Nelson and Laura Lein). Current projects include a study nested within the interim evaluation of the Moving to Opportunity Experiment, an evaluation of the Gautreaux Two housing mobility program in Chicago, and Investing in Enduring Resources with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a study of EITC allocation among low-income households in Boston and Central Illinois. Edin received her PhD in sociology from Northwestern University in 1991 and has also taught at Rutgers University, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
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David T. Ellwood
Scott M. Black Professor of Political Economy
Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School
David Ellwood, the Scott M. Black Professor of Political Economy, has served as Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government since July 1, 2004. As Dean, Ellwood sets the strategic direction of the Kennedy School and leads its efforts to advance the public interest. Ellwood has been Academic Dean of the Kennedy School and served in government as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services (1993-95). Ellwood's academic training is as a labor economist who specializes in poverty and welfare, family change, low pay, and unemployment. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Welfare Realities: From Rhetoric to Reform, co-authored with Mary Jo Bane. His book Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the notable books of 1988 and by the Policy Studies Organization as the outstanding book of 1988. Ellwood’s most recent research (much of it with Christopher Jencks) focused on the changing patterns of family structure in the U.S. and abroad. This research examines how timing of childbearing and marriage have changed in various nations, whether there are differences in trends across class/educational background within each nation, and the extent to which economic and sociological models can explain the difference by education within countries and between them. Ellwood has also examined future trends in labor markets and their implications for future patterns of inequality. The research charts the striking shifts in labor force demographics expected over the next 20 years and explores the effects of various policies for dealing with these changes.
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Ronald F. Ferguson
Lecturer in Public Policy
Ronald Ferguson is an economist and Senior Research Associate at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and has taught at Harvard since 1983. His teaching and publications cover a variety of issues related to education and economic development. Much of his research since the mid-1990s has focused on racial achievement gaps, appearing in publications of the National Research Council, the Brookings Institution, and the U.S. Department of Education, in addition to various books and scholarly journals. He participates in a variety of consulting and policy advisory activities, including work with school districts on closing achievement gaps. He is the creator and Director of the Tripod Project for School Improvement and is also the Faculty Cochair and Director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University. Ferguson earned an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a PhD from MIT, both in economics.
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Richard B. Freeman
Herbert S. Ascherman Professor of Economics
Richard B. Freeman holds the Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard University. He is currently serving as Faculty Co-Chair of the Harvard University Trade Union Program. He is also director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, co-director of the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance, and visiting professor at the London School of Economics. Professor Freeman has published over 300 articles dealing with topics in youth labor market problems, crime, higher education, the growth and decline of unionism, self-organizing non-unions in the labor market, restructuring European welfare states, Chinese labor markets, transitional economies, high skilled labor markets, economic discrimination, labor standards and globalization, income distribution and equity in the marketplace. He is currently directing an LSE research program on the effects of the internet on labor markets, social behavior, and the economy. Freeman has written or edited 25 books, several of which have been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. His most recent books include: America Works: The Exceptional Labor Market (NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007); Working at the Endless Frontier, based on the Yale Okun Lectures, in progress; Visible Hands: Labor Institutions in the Economy (Clarendon Lectures, Oxford University Press, 2008); The Labor Market Comes to China (forthcoming 2008); and What Workers Want, with Joel Rogers. (NY: Cornell University Press, 1999, 2006 updated edition), which was selected as one of the Noteworthy Books in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics, 1999, Princeton University Industrial Relations Section.
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Roland G. Fryer
Professor of Economics
Roland Fryer, Jr. is a professor of economics at Harvard University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a former junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows - one of academia's most prestigious research posts. In January 2008, at the age of 30, he became the youngest African-American to receive tenure from Harvard. He has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation, and the inaugural Alphonse Fletcher Award ("Guggenheims for race issues"). In addition to his teaching and research responsibilities, Fryer served as the Chief Equality Officer at the New York City Department of Education during the 2007-2008 school year. In this role, he developed and implemented several innovative ideas on student motivation and teacher pay-for-performance concepts. He won a Titanium Lion at the Canne Lions International Advertising Festival (Breakthrough Idea of the year in 2008) for the Million Motivation Campaign. Fryer has published papers on topics such as the racial achievement gap, the causes and consequences of distinctively black names, affirmative action, the impact of the crack cocaine epidemic, historically black colleges and universities, and "acting white." He is an unapologetic analyst of American inequality who uses theoretical, empirical, and experimental tools to squeeze truths from data - wherever that may lead.
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Filiz Garip
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Filiz Garip received her Ph.D. in Sociology and M.S.E in Operations Research & Financial Engineering both from Princeton University. Her empirical research spans the substantive fields of migration, inequality, diffusion, social networks, economic sociology, and development. Her methodological approach is to develop and employ custom analysis techniques that can most effectively answer the substantive question at-hand. She primarily applies quantitative methods and analyzes large survey data, yet supplements the empirical results with insights from qualitative field observation. Besides flexibility with respect to different styles of analysis, her research is characterized by openness to multiple disciplinary viewpoints. Coming from an engineering background, she often combines different approaches, ideas or methods that are typically separated by disciplinary boundaries.
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Claudine Gay
Professor of Government and of Africa and African American Studies
Claudine Gay (Ph.D., Harvard, 1998) is professor of government, with research and teaching interests in the fields of American political behavior, public opinion, and race and ethnic politics. Before joining the department, Gay was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University from 2000 to 2005, and an associate professor from 2005 to 2006. From 1999 to 2000, Gay was a Visiting Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Her research has considered the effects of descriptive representation on citizens' orientations toward their government, the role of neighborhoods in shaping the racial and political attitudes of Black Americans, and the effects of concentrated poverty on political engagement. Her work has been published in Political Psychology, the American Political Science Review, and the American Journal of Political Science.
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Edward L. Glaeser
Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics
Edward Glaeser is Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He teaches in microeconomic theory. His work has also examined the causes of hatred and why the U.S. doesn't have a European-style welfare state. He has published dozens of papers on cities, economic growth, law and economics. In particular, his work has focused on the determinants of city growth and the role of cities as centers of idea transmission. He also edits the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Glaeser received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992.
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Claudia Goldin
Henry Lee Professor of Economics
Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and director of the NBER’s Development of the American Economy program. Goldin’s research is in the general area of American economic history and has covered topics that include slavery, emancipation, the post-bellum South, the family, women in the economy, the economic impact of war, immigration, New Deal policies, inequality, technological change, and education. Most of her research interprets the “present through the lens of the past” and explores the origins of current issues of concern. Many of her recent papers concern the rise of mass education in the United States and its impact on economic growth and wage inequality. They form the core of her recently published book, The Race between Education and Technology (with L. Katz; The Belknap Press, 2008). She is the author and editor of several books, among them Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (Oxford 1990), The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy (with G. Libecap; University of Chicago Press 1994), The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (with M. Bordo and E. White; University of Chicago Press 1998), and Corruption and Reform: Lesson’s from America’s Economic History (with E. Glaeser; Chicago 2006). Goldin has also continued her work on various gender issues. Her most recent papers in that area have concerned the impact of “the pill” on women’s career and marriage decisions, women’s surnames after marriage as a social indicator, and the reasons why women are now the majority of undergraduates. Goldin has also explored the past century of the career and family tradeoff among college graduate women in the United States. She has recently embarked on a wide ranging project on the family and career “transitions” of male and female graduates of selective universities from the late 1960s to the present.
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Peter A. Hall
Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies
Peter A. Hall is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies, a Faculty Associate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and Co-Director of the Program on Successful Societies for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Hall is an editor of Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make; Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage; The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations; Developments in French Politics I and II; and European Labor in the 1980s; and the author of Governing the Economy: The Politics of Intervention in Britain and France as well as over sixty articles on European politics, policy-making, and comparative political economy. He serves on the editorial boards of many journals and the advisory boards of several European institutes. He is currently working on the methodology of political science, the institutional responses to economic integration in postwar Europe , and the contribution of social institutions to population health.
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Jennifer L. Hochschild
Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies
Jennifer Hochschild joined the Government Department in January 2001, and is now the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor Government and Professor of African and African American Studies. She also holds lectureships in the Kennedy School of Government and the Graduate School of Education. Prof. Hochschild studies the intersection of American politics and political philosophy—particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and immigration—and educational policy. She also works on issues in public opinion and political culture. She is the co-author of The American Dream and the Public Schools (Oxford University Press, 2003); and author of Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton University Press, 1995); The New American Dilemma: Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation (Yale University Press, 1984); and What's Fair: American Beliefs about Distributive Justice (Harvard University Press, 1981). She is also a co-author or co-editor of other books and articles. Her current project is tentatively entitled Blurring Racial Boundaries: Skin Color Hierarchy and Multiracialism in American Politics. Prof. Hochschild is the founding editor of Perspectives on Politics, published by the American Political Science Association. She is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a former vice-president of the American Political Science Association, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation, and a former member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey. She teaches courses on racial and ethnic politics, American political thought, power in American society, and inequality and social policy.
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Torben Iversen
Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Government
Torben Iversen is Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy. His research and teaching interests include comparative political economy, electoral politics, and applied formal theory. He is the author of Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Contested Economic Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and co-editor of Unions, Employers and Central Bankers (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He has previously written about voting and party behavior, while most of his current work focuses on the political economy of distribution and economic performance. He is the author or co-author of more than two dozen articles in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Public Choice, Quarterly Journal of Economics, World Politics, and numerous edited volumes. He is currently working on two book-length projects: one on the political representation of economic interests (with David Soskice), and another on the political economy of gender inequality (with Frances Rosenbluth).
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Christopher Jencks
Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy
Christopher 'Sandy' Jencks is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy. He has taught at Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Earlier, he was a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC (1963 to 1967) and an editor of the New Republic (1961 to 1963). He is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the American Prospect. His recent research deals with changes in family structure over the past generation, the costs and benefits of economic inequality, the extent to which economic advantages are inherited, and the effects of welfare reform. His books include The Academic Revolution (with David Riesman); Inequality: Who Gets Ahead?; The Urban Underclass (with Paul Peterson); Rethinking Social Policy; The Homeless; and The Black White Test Score Gap (with Meredith Phillips).
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Thomas J. Kane
Professor of Education and Economics
Thomas Kane is professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and faculty director of the Project for Policy Innovation in Education, a new program that partners with states and districts to evaluate innovative policies. His work has influenced how we think about a range of education policies, including test score volatility and the design of school accountability systems, teacher recruitment and retention, financial aid for college, race-conscious college admissions and the economic payoff to a community college. From 1995 to 1996, Kane served as the senior staff economist for labor, education, and welfare policy issues within President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. From 1991 through 2000, he was a faculty member at the Kennedy School of Government. Kane has also been a professor of public policy at UCLA and has held visiting fellowships at the Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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Lawrence F. Katz
Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics
Lawrence F. Katz is the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on issues in labor economics and the economics of social problems. He is the author (with Claudia Goldin) of The Race between Education and Technology (Harvard University Press, 2008), a history of U.S. economic inequality and the roles of technological change and the pace of educational advance in affecting the wage structure. Katz also has been studying the impacts of neighborhood poverty on low-income families as the principal investigator of the long-term evaluation of the Moving to Opportunity program, a randomized housing mobility experiment. And Katz is working with Claudia Goldin on a long-term project studying the historical evolution of career and family choices and outcomes for U.S. college men and women. His past research has explored a wide range of topics including the U.S. and comparative wage inequality trends, the impact of globalization and technological change on the labor market, the economics of immigration, unemployment, regional labor markets, the evaluation of labor market programs, the problems of low-income neighborhoods, and the social and economic consequences of the birth control pill. Professor Katz has been editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics since 1991 and served as the Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor for 1993 and 1994. Katz graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981 and earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.
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Alexander Keyssar
Matthew W. Stirling, Jr., Professor of History and Social Policy Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy. An historian by training, he has specialized in the excavation of issues that have contemporary policy implications. His 1986 book, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts, was awarded three scholarly prizes. His most recent book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000), was named the best book in U.S. history by the American Historical Association and the Historical Society; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Keyssar is coauthor of Inventing America, a text integrating the history of technology and science into the mainstream of American history, as well as coeditor of a series on Comparative and International Working-Class History. Keyssar's current research interests include election reform, the history of democracies and the history of poverty.
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Michèle Lamont
Robert I. Goldman Professor of Sociology
Michèle Lamont is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and is co-director of its research program on Successful Societies. Lamont’s scholarly interests center on shared concepts of worth and their impact on hierarchies in a number of social domains. She has written on how culture contributes to ethno-racial and class inequality and on the evaluation of excellence in higher education. Recent areas of interest include racism and anti-racism (how discriminated people -including immigrants- respond to exclusion and understand the relationship between themselves and others), the sociology of the social sciences, and the impact of self-identity on health. She is the author, mostly recently, of How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2009). Also forthcoming, Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Matter for Health (Cambridge University Press, August 2009, with Peter A. Hall). Professor Lamont serves as director of the European Network on Inequality of the Harvard Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy.
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Jeffrey B. Liebman
Malcolm Wiener Professor of Public Policy (on leave)
Jeffrey B. Liebman is currently on leave from the Harvard Kennedy School, serving Associate Economic Director of the Office of Management and Budget. At Harvard, Liebman teaches public sector economics and is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  In his research, he studies tax and budget policy, social insurance, and labor markets. His previous work has examined the impact of the Earned Income Tax Credit on income inequality, labor supply, and taxpayer compliance. He is currently working on an evaluation of a housing mobility experiment and on studies of Social Security reform options. From 1998-99, Liebman served as special assistant to the President for economic policy and coordinated the Clinton Administration's Social Security reform working group.  Liebman received his BA from Yale University and his MA and PhD in economics from Harvard.
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Erzo F.P. Luttmer
Associate Professor of Public Policy
Erzo F.P. Luttmer, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School, teaches public economics and microeconomics. His research interests include public economics, labor economics, and applied econometrics. Within these fields, his research focuses on income redistribution programs and the role of social effects on economic outcomes. In recent research, he has conducted a randomized experiment to examine the effect of the race and income of Katrina victims on Americans generosity towards them, explored the efficiency gains of giving people a choice of tax schedules, and investigated whether individuals respond to the link between their current payment of Social Security taxes and their expected future Social Security benefits. From 1999 to 2000, he worked as an economist at the World Bank. Luttmer received a master's degree in econometrics from Erasmus University Rotterdam and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
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Jane J. Mansbridge
Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values
Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, is the author of Beyond Adversary Democracy, an empirical and normative study of face-to-face democracy, and the award-winning Why We Lost the ERA, a study of anti-deliberative dynamics in social movements based on organizing for an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. She is also editor or coeditor of the volumes Beyond Self-Interest, Feminism, and Oppositional Consciousness. Her current work includes studies of representation, democratic deliberation, everyday activism, and the public understanding of collective action problems.
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Jal Mehta
Assistant Professor of Education
Jal Mehta completed his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University in 2006. His dissertation was on the political forces driving changes in American education policy over the last 25 years. He has published on a variety of education-related topics, including school violence, stereotype threat, and the achievement gap. The book he co-authored with Katherine Newman, Rampage: the Social Roots of School Shootings was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills award. He has taught as a teaching fellow for a graduate course in qualitative methods, as well as undergraduate courses on American society and politics and the future of social justice, both of which included units on education policy. As apostdoctoral fellow at HGSE he has been working with Professor Richard Elmore.
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Pamela L. Metz
Director
Pamela Metz oversees administration of the Joint Ph.D. Programs in Social Policy, whose administrative offices are housed at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. She also manages the Harvard Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy, a National Science Foundation graduate training program for Harvard Ph.D. students in the social sciences. Prior to joining the Inequality and Social Policy programs, Metz was a Ph.D. candidate in the Harvard Government Department, where she studied international relations, political economy, and Latin American politics. A graduate of Wellesley College, she has been a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, a Harvard MacArthur Fellow in International Security, and a teaching fellow in the College for various courses in international relations and American foreign policy. In her spare time, she dreams of Downeast Maine—particularly the easternmost town of Lubec.

Richard J. Murnane
Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education
and Society
Richard Murnane is an economist who focuses his research on the relationships between education and the economy, teacher labor markets, the determinants of children's achievement, and strategies for making schools more effective. In his book Who Will Teach? Policies that Matter (with Judith Singer and John Willett), Murnane shows that teachers' salaries and certification requirements strongly affect the composition of the public-school teaching force. Murnane's 1996 book Teaching the New Basic Skills, coauthored by MIT professor Frank Levy, explains how changes in the U.S. economy have increased the skills that high-school graduates need to earn a middle-class living, and shows how schools need to change to provide all students with the requisite skills. In spring 2004, Princeton University Press published Murnane and Levy's book, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market. This book shows how the spread of information technology has increased the value of some human skills and decreased the value of others. It also explains how education and training programs need to respond to new labor market realities. In 2005, Murnane and two Harvard colleagues edited Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning. It stems from work Murnane started in 2001, helping the central office of the Boston Public Schools to better support the efforts of BPS schools in learning from student assessment results. Murnane is currently working with HGSE Professor John B. Willett on a book describing how improvements in research design and analysis strategies can help educational researchers to make valid causal inferences in educational policy research.
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Orlando Patterson
John Cowles Professor of Sociology
Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology, received his B.Sc. in Economics from London University and went on to take a Ph.D. in Sociology from the London School of Economics in 1965. After faculty appointments at the London School of Economics and the University of the West Indies, he moved to Harvard in 1969-70 and was appointed Professor the following year. An early interest, mainly historical and literary, in Jamaican slavery matured into a sociological fascination with slave society as a system of total domination posing empirically the Hobbesean problem of order. His dissertation, The Sociology of Slavery: Jamaica, 1655-1838, was published in 1967. From this source his academic interests moved in three main directions: the comparative study of slavery aimed at an understanding of power at its limits, on both the personal and systemic levels; the study of its antithesis, freedom; and the study of socio-economic underdevelopment with special reference to Jamaica and the Caribbean Basin. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study was published by Harvard Press in 1982. The problem of underdevelopment has been explored in papers on the Caribbean and many policy-oriented reports, which he prepared for the government of Jamaica during his tenure as Special Advisor to Prime Minister Michael Manley for Social Policy and Development (1972-1980). The convergence of his primary interests led naturally to an exploration of the problem of ethnicity resulting in the publication of Ethnic Chauvinism: The Reactionary Impulse (1977). His study of slavery and domination prompted interest in, and the study of, the nature and development of its shadow concept, freedom. The first of a two volume historical sociology of freedom was published in June 1991, entitled Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. He is presently completing the second volume of Freedom, dealing with the modern world. At the same time, he is shifting the focus of his research to contemporary America with special emphasis on the intersecting problems of race, immigration, and multiculturalism. The first two volumes of a trilogy in this area, The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis and Rituals of Blood: The Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries are available from Civitas/Counterpoint. Patterson was awarded the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association in 1983 (The Sorokin Prize), and was co-winner of the Ralph Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association for the best scholarly work on the subject of pluralism. In 1991 he was awarded the National Book Award in non-fiction for Volume 1 of Freedom. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Paul E. Peterson
Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government
Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government, Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and Editor in Chief of Education Next, a journal of opinion and research on education policy. He is a former Director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and of the Governmental Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Peterson is the author or editor of more than 100 articles and 22 books, including The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools; Charters, Vouchers, and Public Education; Earning and Learning: How Schools Matter; Learning From School Choice; The Politics of School Reform: 1870-1940; School Politics Chicago Style; City Limits; The New Urban Reality; The Urban Underclass; The Price of Federalism; Welfare Magnets; and The New American Democracy. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he was a professor for many years there in the Departments of Political Science and Education. Peterson chaired the Social Science Research Council's Committee on the Urban Underclass and has served on many committees of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Foundation, and the Center for Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Most recently he was awarded the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation prize for Distinguished Scholarship, part of its Excellence in Education award program. He has also been appointed to a Department of Education independent review panel to advise the agency in evaluating the No Child Left Behind Act.
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Robert D. Putnam
Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy
Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2006, Putnam received the Skytte Prize, one of the world's highest accolades for a political scientist. Raised in a small town in the Midwest and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School of Government. He has written a dozen books, translated into seventeen languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as "a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber." Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone rank high among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last several decades. Putnam has worked on these themes with both the Clinton and Bush White Houses, as well as with the Blair Government, the Irish Taoiseach, and other political leaders and grassroots civic activists around the world. He founded the Saguaro Seminar, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal. His earlier work included research on comparative political elites, Italian politics, and globalization. He is currently working on three major empirical projects: (1) the changing role of religion in contemporary America, (2) the effects of workplace practices on family and community life, and (3) practical strategies for civic renewal in the United States in the context of immigration and social and ethnic diversity.
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Dani Rodrik
Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy
Dani Rodrik is the Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University . He has published widely in the areas of international economics, economic development, and political economy. What constitutes good economic policy and why some governments are better than others in adopting it are the central questions on which his research focuses. He is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Centre for Economic Policy Research ( London ), Center for Global Development, Institute for International Economics, and Council on Foreign Relations. He has been the recipient of research grants from the Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation. Among other honors, he was presented the Leontief Award for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2002. Professor Rodrik has published widely on issues related to trade policy, political economy, and economic reform in developing economies. He is the author of "Democracies Pay Higher Wages," Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 1999; “Why Do More Open Economies Have Bigger Governments?” Journal of Political Economy, October 1998; “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth” (with A. Alesina), Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1994; and “Resistance to Reform: Status Quo Bias in the Presence of Individual-Specific Uncertainty” (with R. Fernandez), American Economic Review, 1991; among other publications. His 1997 book Has Globalization Gone Too Far? was called “one of the most important economics books of the decade” in Business Week. His most recent book is In Search of Prosperity: Analytic Narratives on Economic Growth (Princeton University Press, 2003.) His recent research is concerned with the consequences of international economic integration and the institutional underpinnings of economic development.
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Matt Salesses
Seminar Coordinator
Matt Salesses helps coordinate the Inequality and Social Policy Seminar Series. He is also currently an MFA candidate in fiction writing at Emerson College, where he is working with Margot Livesey on his thesis, a novel entitled, The Last American. He edits the Emerson graduate literary journal, Redivider, recently named one of the top ten literary magazines in New England. His nonfiction has been published as a chapbook, We Will Take What We Can Get, by Publishing Genius Press, and in journals such as Make, Dewclaw, and The Lifted Brow. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, Pleiades, Mid-American Review, The Literary Review, and over twenty other publications.
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Robert J. Sampson
Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences
Robert J. Sampson is currently Chairman of the Department of Sociology and the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University , where he was appointed in 2003. Before that he taught for twelve years in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and seven years in his first faculty post at the University of Illinois , Urbana-Champaign. Sampson was also a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation from 1994-2002, and in the 1997-98 and 2002-03 academic years he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California . He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. Professor Sampson's research interests center on crime, deviance, and stigma; the life course; neighborhood effects; and the social organization of cities. In the area of neighborhood effects and urban studies his current work is focusing on race/ethnicity and social mechanisms of ecological inequality, the subjective meanings and implications of "disorder," spatial dynamics, the comparative network structure of community influence, collective civic engagement, and other topics linked to the general idea of community-level social processes. Much of this work stems from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), for which Sampson serves as Scientific Director.
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Theda Skocpol
Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and of Sociology
Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology. From 2005 to 2007, she served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. During Skocpol’s tenure as Dean, the Graduate School at Harvard reached out to engage faculty in new ways and undertook new initiatives in sharing information, monitoring student progress toward the PhD, improving the funding of graduate education, and promoting interdisciplinary studies. From 2000 to 2006, Skocpol served as Director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard, expanding this center from a tiny operation within one department into a broadly interdisciplinary center supporting joint faculty projects and graduate and undergraduate research on all aspects of modern U.S. politics. Skocpol received her BA in 1969 from Michigan State University and her PhD in 1975 from Harvard University. In 1996, Skocpol served as President of the Social Science History Association, an interdisciplinary professional group; and from 2001 to 2003 she served as President-Elect and then President, during it's centennial year, of the 14,000-member American Political Science Association. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Skocpol has also been awarded honorary degrees by Michigan State University, Northwestern University, and Amherst College. In 2007, she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for her “visionary analysis of the significance of the state for revolutions, welfare, and political trust, pursued with theoretical depth and empirical evidence.” The Skytte Prize is one of the largest and most prestigious in political science and is awarded annually by the Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University (Sweden) to the scholar who in the view of the foundation has made the most valuable contribution to the discipline. The author of nine books, nine edited collections, and more than seven dozen articles, Skocpol is recognized as one of the most cited and widely influential scholars in the modern social sciences; her work has contributed to the study of comparative politics, American politics, comparative and historical sociology, U.S. history, and the study of public policy. Her first book, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979), won the 1979 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1980 American Sociological Association Award for a Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship. A leader in historical-institutional and comparative research, Skocpol edited Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (1984) and co-edited the influential Social Science Research Council collection Bringing the State Back In (1985). For the past fifteen years, Skocpol’s research has focused on U.S. politics in historical and comparative perspective. Her Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992), won five scholarly awards: the J. David Greenstone Award of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association; the Outstanding Book Award of the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association; the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association, given annually for “the best book published in the United States during the prior year on government, politics or international affairs; the 1993 Allan Sharlin Memorial Award of the Social Science History Association; and the 1993 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa, given to honor “a comprehensive study that contributes significantly to historical, philosophical, or religious interpretations of the human condition.” Skocpol’s recent books include Boomerang: Health Reform and the Turn Against Government (1996); Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (2003, winner of the 2004 Greenstone Award); Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn (edited with Lawrence R. Jacobs, 2005); What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (with Ariane Liazos and Marshall Ganz), published by Princeton University Press, 2006, which received the 2007 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award presented by the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities of the American Sociological Association; and The Transformation of American Politics (co-edited with Paul Pierson, 2007). Skocpol’s current research focuses on civic engagement, governmental transformation, and reform politics in the United States and on the development of U.S. social and educational policies in historical and comparative perspective.
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Elizabeth Warren
Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law
An expert in bankruptcy and commercial law, Elizabeth Warren is the author of The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke (Basic Books, 2003) and All Your Worth: the Lifetime Money Plan (Simon and Schuster, 2005). In 2007 the National Law Journal identified Warren as one of the “50 Most Influential Women Lawyers in America,” citing her work in bankruptcy and consumer protection, including her fight against the unfair practices of credit card companies. Warren currently chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP) monitoring the Treasury’s financial rescue plan.
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Mary C. Waters
M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology
Mary C. Waters specializes in the study of immigration, inter-group relations, the formation of racial and ethnic identity among the children of immigrants, and the challenges of measuring race and ethnicity. Waters received a B.A. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1978, an M.A. in Demography (1981) and an M.A. (1983) and PhD in Sociology (1986) from the University of California at Berkeley . She has taught at Harvard University since 1986, and was chair of the Sociology Department from 2001-2005. She is the author of two recent books, Inheriting the City: The Second Generation Comes of Age (with Jennifer Holdaway, Philip Kasinitz, and John Mollenkopf), (Russell Sage Foundation Press, forthcoming); and The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965 (with Reed Ueda and Helen Marrow), (Harvard University Press, 2007). She is also author of Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Harvard University Press, 1999, paper ed. 2001). This book won five scholarly awards including the Mira Komarovsky Award of the Eastern Sociological Society, the Otis Dudley Duncan Award of the Population Section of the American Sociological Association, the Thomas and Znaniecki Award of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association, the Best Book Award of the Section on Race and Urban Politics of the American Political Science Association, and the Best Book Award of the Center for the Study of Inequality of Cornell University. Her other books include Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation (co-edited with Phillip Kasinitz and John Mollenkopf) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2004), Social Inequalities in Comparative Perspective, co-edited with Fiona Devine) (Blackwell Press, 2004), The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals (co-edited with Joel Perlmann) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002, paper 2005), The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation (co-edited with Peggy Levitt) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002), Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (University of California Press, 1990) and From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (with Stanley Lieberson) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1988). She is also the author of over 40 articles and chapters on racial and ethnic identity and immigrant assimilation.
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BruceWestern
Professor of Sociology
Bruce Western is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Harvard Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy. Western’s work has focused on the role of incarceration in social and economic inequality in American society. With a strong background in statistics and quantitative methods, Western has widely utilized Bayesian analysis in his work. Western’s first book, Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies (Princeton University Press, 1997), concerned the growth and decline of unions in capitalist democracies. His research includes extensive quantitative and qualitative methodologies. In his second book, Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), Western asks what role incarceration plays in the increasing class stratification of American society. He shows that the elevated numbers of incarcerated African Americans in the 1990s have caused a rift in African American society, and that those with less education are increasingly separated from those with higher education. The book also explicates further economic ramifications of the trend towards mass incarceration: by removing large numbers of poorly educated young men from the labor market, statistics on wages and unemployment were artificially skewed. Western received his B.A. in government from the University of Queensland, Australia, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Martin Whyte
Professor of Sociology
Martin Whyte joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology in Fall 2000 after previously teaching at the University of Michigan and George Washington University. Whyte's primary research and teaching specialties are comparative sociology, sociology of the family, sociology of development, the sociological study of contemporary China, and the study of post-communist transitions. Whyte’s most recent writings reflect these divergent interests: an edited volume entitled Marriage in America: A Communitarian Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) and an edited collection of papers drawing on a survey project that focused on relations between aging parents and their grown children in urban Chinese families, entitled China's Revolutions and Inter-Generational Relations (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 2003). One newer research project involves surveys on Chinese popular perceptions of inequality trends and views about distributive justice issues. A pilot survey for this project was successfully conducted in Beijing in December 2000. A national survey focusing on inequality and distributive justice issues was completed in the summer of 2004.
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Kim M. Williams
Associate Professor of Public Policy
Kim M. Williams, Associate Professor of Public Policy, teaches and conducts research on American racial politics, social movements, and immigration policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University . Her first book, Mark One or More: Civil Rights in Multiracial America (2006), explains how a small group of activists spurred the recent restructuring of the American racial classification system. The book argues that the new system of racial counting is likely to reach deeply into the civil rights agenda. Williams has contributed chapters to numerous edited volumes and she is the author of “Multiracialism & the Civil Rights Future,” recently published in Daedalus. Currently, Professor Williams is working on her second book, Transition: The Politics of Racial and Ethnic Change in Urban America, which focuses on the challenge of black politics to the rise of other minority groups. Williams received a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. from Cornell University .
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Julie Boatright Wilson
Harry Kahn Senior Lecturer in Social Policy
Julie Wilson is the Harry Kahn Senior Lecturer in Social Policy. She is also Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and Secretary of the Kennedy School. She is interested in poverty policy, family policy, and urban race relations. Among her recent projects are several case studies on the historical development of poor neighborhoods, studies on adoption from public agencies, and strategies for strengthening families' capacities to parent. Wilson spent three years at the New York State Department of Social Services, where she directed the Office of Program Planning, Analysis, and Development.
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William Julius Wilson
Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor
William Julius Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. He is one of only 20 University Professors, the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member. After receiving the Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1966, Wilson taught sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1972. In 1990 he was appointed the Lucy Flower University Professor and director of the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Urban Inequality. He joined the faculty at Harvard in July of 1996. Past President of the American Sociological Association, Wilson has received 41 honorary degrees, including honorary doctorates from Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. A MacArthur Prize Fellow from 1987 to 1992, Wilson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute of Medicine, and the British Academy. In June 1996 he was selected by Time magazine as one of “ America's 25 Most Influential People.” He is a recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States, and was awarded the Talcott Parsons Prize in the Social Sciences by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He is the author of numerous publications, including The Declining Significance of Race, winner of the American Sociological Association's Sydney Spivack Award; The Truly Disadvantaged, which was selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the 16 best books of 1987, and received The Washington Monthly Annual Book Award and the Society for the Study of Social Problems' C. Wright Mills Award; When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, which was selected as one of the notable books of 1996 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review and received the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award; and The Bridge Over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics. Most recently he is the co-author of There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America and Good Kids in Bad Neighborhoods: Successful Development in Social Context. In his latest book, More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (Issues of Our Time), published by W.W. Norton in Mar 2009, Professor Wilson presents a new framework for understanding racial inequality.
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Christopher Winship
Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology
Christopher Winship, Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology, and member of the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (HKS), was born in Topeka, Kansas and grew up in New Britain, Connecticut. He did his undergraduate work in sociology and mathematics at Dartmouth College and his graduate work in the Harvard Sociology Department, receiving his degree in 1977. After leaving Harvard he did a one year post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin and a two-year fellowship at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. In 1980 he joined the Sociology Department at Northwestern University. During his twelve years at Northwestern he was Director of the Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences and for four years chair of the Department of Sociology. He was a founding member of Northwestern's Department of Statistics, and held a courtesy appointment in Economics. From 1984 to 1986 he was Director of the Economics Research Center at NORC. He has been a member of the Harvard department since 1992. Since 1995 he has been the editor of Sociological Methods and Research (SMR). He is a faculty associate of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) and the Harvard Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, and is currently doing research on several topics: The Ten Point Coalition, a group of black ministers who are working with the Boston police to reduce youth violence; statistical models for causal analysis; the effects of education on mental ability; causes of the racial difference in performance in elite colleges and universities; changes in the racial differential in imprisonment rates over the past sixty years.
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