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Why Falling Home Prices Could Be a Good Thing
February 10, 2017
The New York Times | By Conor Dougherty
"Suppose there were a way to pump up the economy, reduce inequality, and put an end to destructive housing bubbles like the one that contributed to the Great Recession."
Discusses recent paper by economists Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Joe Gyourko at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, which reviews the basic economics and functioning of the U.S. housing market "to better understand the impacts on home prices, household wealth, and the spatial distribution of people across markets."
Also cites research by Daniel Shoag (Ph.D. '11), Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, and Peter Ganong of the University of Chicago, on the role of housing prices in limiting the ability of low-income workers to migrate to higher-wage areas, thereby contributing income inequality.
See also
- Welcome to the 'Great Divergence'
February 14, 2017
The Atlantic—CityLab | Before 1980, places in America with lower average incomes grew faster than their richer counterparts, so that incomes converged. Today, that’s no longer the case. Richard Florida delves into a recent study by economists Peter Ganong, Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School, and Daniel Shoag (Ph.'11), Associate Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.
View the research
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San Francisco Is So Expensive Even Renters Can Be NiMBYs
February 10, 2017
The Atlantic—CityLab | Features new research by Michael Hankinson, Ph.D. candidate in Government & Social Policy, on the politics of affordable housing. Learn more about Hankinson's work at his website:
mhankinson.com
The fallacy of Trump’s “send in the Feds” fix for Chicago
February 20, 2017
Vox | Cites recent study by Matthew Desmond, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard, Andrew V. Papachristos of Yale University, and David S. Kirk at University of Oxford, published in the American Sociological Review, which looked at the effects of highly publicized incidents of police brutality on 911 calls in Milwaukee.
View the research
Trump’s storm keeps Democrats busy on many fronts
February 17, 2017
San Francisco Chronicle | Quoted: Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology. Midterm elections such as 2018 favor opposition parties, which makes House Democrats “well positioned” as a fulcrum of the Trump resistance, said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard University sociologist. “That’s the place where Democrats will be able to make gains, if they can pick up support from a broader array of people,” Skocpol said. “That and the governors races are the really critical turning points.”
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Triumph of the City: Engines of Innovation
February 16, 2017
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.
Monopolies Are Worse Than We Thought
February 15, 2017
Bloomberg View | New research suggests that growing market concentration may partly explain labor's declining share of national income, but what accounts for this growing market concentration? A new paper by David Autor (MIT), David Dorn (University of Zurich), Lawrence Katz (Harvard), Christina Patterson (MIT), and John Van Reenen (MIT) suggests a technological explanation driving the rise of "superstar firms" in "winner take most' markets. This paper is forthcoming in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings.
View the research
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Making Evidence Locally: Rethinking education research under the Every Student Succeeds Act
February 15, 2017
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.
See also
Bakeries are booming, but bakers are in short supply
February 15, 2017
Boston Globe | Why are Boston bakeries struggling to find skilled bakers? Alicia Sasser Modestino (Ph.D. '01) discusses the state of the labor market. Modestino is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Economics at Northeastern University, and Associate Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy.
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The confused future of health care
February 14, 2017
Harvard Gazette | Coverage of the JFK Jr. Forum event, "Alternatives to the Affordable Care Act," with panelists Katherine Baicker, C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics at Harvard; Jonathan Gruber, Ford Professor of Economics at MIT; Avik Roy, co-founder and president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity; and Gail R. Wilensky, senior fellow at Project HOPE and former director of Medicare and Medicaid. Moderated by Amitabh Chandra, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy. Co-sponsored by the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy.
View event video
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The Relentless Pace of Automation
February 13, 2017
MIT Technology Review | Quotes Lawrence Katz, Elisabath Allison Professor of Economics:“I’m very worried that the next wave [of AI and automation] will hit and we won’t have the supports in place,” says Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard. Katz has published research showing that large investments in secondary education in the early 1900s helped the nation make the shift from an agriculture-based economy to a manufacturing one.
And now, he says, we could use our education system much more effectively. For example, some areas of the United States have successfully connected training programs at community colleges to local companies and their needs, he says, but other regions have not, and the federal government has done little in this realm. As a result, he says, “large areas have been left behind.”
Also quotes MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who presented his latest work in this area, "Machine vs. Man: The Labor Market in the Age of Robots," in the Harvard Inequality Seminar, Feb 6, 2017.
View seminar abstract
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People Trying to Save Prefer Accounts That Are Hard to Tap
February 12, 2017
Wall Street Journal | Research suggests policy makers could make retirement accounts even more restrictive without reducing their appeal. Discusses findings of an experimental study by John Beshears (Harvard Business School), James J. Choi (Yale), Christopher Harris (University of Cambridge), David Laibson (Harvard Economics), Brigitte C. Madrian (Harvard Kennedy School), and Jung Sakong (University of Chicago).
View the research
Related
- Americans just can't leave retirement savings alone
February 13, 2017
Marketplace | “For every dollar people are contributing to the retirement savings system, about 40 cents of that money is coming out before people reach their late 50s,” said Brigitte Madrian, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “That’s a quite striking amount of leakage, especially when many people are not saving enough in the first place.”
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The most important phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance
February 13, 2017
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 subsequent 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.
Could this be the left's tea party moment?
February 12, 2017
CNN Opinion | 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 Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2012).
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In the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 16 families are evicted every day. Photograph: Philip Montgomery
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No place like home: America's eviction epidemic
February 12, 2017
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.
See also
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More Women in their 60's and 70's are Working
February 11, 2017
The New York Times | The Upshot talks with Harvard economist Claudia Goldin on her recent study with Lawrence Katz, "Women Working Longer: Facts and Some Explanations." Also highlights Goldin's work with Joshua Mitchell (Ph.D. '11), a senior economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Economics Perspectives.
"Nearly 30 percent of women 65 to 69 are working, up from 15 percent in the late 1980s, one of the analyses, by the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, found. Eighteen percent of women 70 to 74 work, up from 8 percent.
"This rejection of retirement is more common among women with higher education and savings, though not confined to them. Those who are not working are more likely to have poor health and low savings, and to be dependent on Social Security and sometimes disability benefits, Goldin said.
Of those still working, Goldin said, 'They’re in occupations in which they really have an identity.' She added, 'Women have more education, they’re in jobs that are more fulfilling, and they stay with them.'”
View the research (Goldin and Katz)
View JEP article (Goldin and Mitchell)
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What's next? In the wake of the election,
HKS faculty discuss the coming challenges
February 9, 2017
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 U.S. economy and social policy priorities: 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 Kennedy School.
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Excerpts
"Those are places where it really does feel like it’s not only that people are struggling—their kids are struggling...I care a lot about mobility from poverty. But what is very, very clear is you go to certain regions and it just doesn’t feel like there’s any mobility from anything."
—David Ellwood
"I don’t think we’ve thought through all the things that we need to do as a society to help people who don’t get pensions through their employers, who don’t get health insurance through their employers."
—Doug Elmendorf
"We’ve basically replaced private employer pensions for individuals in the private sector, not in the public sector, with 401(k) plans where the outcome is really determined by how much you save and whether you make good investment choices or not. It’s a riskier proposition for individuals, and one key element of risk is that only about half the workforce is participating in an employer-sponsored savings plan...
Not only are we seeing inequality in current wages, we’re seeing inequality in the ability to accumulate wealth for retirement that’s going to persist for decades going forward."
—Brigitte Madrian
View full conversation ▶
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Balance of Trade
February 9, 2017
Harvard Kennedy School Magazine
By Robert Kuttner
There are economists who teach the well-known postulate that free trade improves global well-being. There are other social scientists and popular critics who contend that laissez-faire trade can be bad for equality, for social stability, and even for economic efficiency, just as pure laissez-faire is not optimal at home.
And then there is Dani Rodrik.
Rodrik, the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at the Kennedy School, is close to a unique specimen in the field of economics. He is a respectful critic of some of the most cherished suppositions of his profession, notably in his books and articles expressing qualms about globalization. But Rodrik does it as a superb technical economist, with humility, precision, wit, intellectual curiosity, and an astonishing range of reading across disciplines...(Continue reading)
See also
- Global Citizens, National Shirkers
February 10, 2017
Project Syndicate | By Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy, Harvard Kennedy School.
HKS Footprint: Cities
February 9, 2017
Harvard Kennedy School Magazine | At Harvard Kennedy School, cities are a focus for research and an opportunity to experiment with new and better ways of governing. Features the work of Jeffrey Liebman, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy, and the Government Performance Lab, which Liebman directs, and Quinton Mayne, Associate Professor of Public Policy, whose research "has found that where local governments can shape welfare policies, such as in education or social services, citizens are much less likely to be politically disaffected."
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Integration Works: Can It Survive the Trump Era?
February 9, 2017
The New York Times | Thomas B. Edsall reviews an extensive body of empirical evidence on racial and income segregation and socioeconomic mobility, including the work of Raj Chetty of Stanford University and Harvard's Nathaniel Hendren, Assistant Professor of Economics.
The most important skill for the workplace isn’t being taught in American schools
February 9, 2017
Quartz | Discusses research by David Deming (Ph.D. '10), a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Graduate School of Education, who finds that the labor market in recent decades "increasingly rewards social skills", with "employment and wage growth particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both cognitive skill and social skill." Also cites a recent brief from The Hamilton Project, "Seven Facts on Noncognitive Skills from Education to the Labor Market," which draws on Deming's work.
View the research
Government leaders gather at J-PAL North America to advance evidence-based policymaking
February 9, 2017
MIT News | Lawrence Katz, Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard and co-scientific director of JPAL-North America, spoke on leveraging housing vouchers as a ladder to economic mobility for low-income families.
The conference, held at MIT, brought together state and local policymakers with leading researchers to discuss "how governments and researchers have partnered to use evidence from randomized evaluations to reduce crime and violence, improve maternal and child health, and promote housing mobility."
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All hail partisan politics
February 9, 2017
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, Democracy: A Case Study (Harvard University Press, 2017).
See also
- American Democracy is Not a Machine
February 7, 2017
Harvard University Press (blog) | Excerpt from new book by David A. Moss, Paul Whiton Cherington Professor at Harvard Business School.
"Democracy: A Case Study stems from a course that historian David Moss developed in order to bring the strengths of the Harvard Business School’s case study method to conversations about governance, citizenship, and democracy. In the spirit of that course, the book highlights nineteen key episodes in the history of American democracy...In the passage below, excerpted from the book’s Introduction and with reference to its cases, Moss explains why American democracy is better understood as a living organism than a machine..."(Continue reading)
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Integrating Immigrants, with Mary C. Waters
and John Skrentny
February 8, 2017
University of California Television (UCTV) | Mary C. Waters, John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology at Harvard and Chair of a National Academy of Sciences Report on immigrant integration, talks with sociologist John Skrentny, co-director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego.
We were the victims of fake news
February 8, 2017
Brookings Institution | By Norm Eisen and Vanessa Williamson (Ph.D. '15), both fellows in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.
"This week, we discovered that our real work is being used to promote 'fake news'. As Yahoo News has reported, an obscure website, the “Center for Global Strategic Monitoring,” has been putting policy experts’ names on articles they did not write..."
The Tea Party's Revival as the Party of Trump
February 7, 2017
OZY | Quoted: Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology.
“[The Tea Party] was never about small government; it was about small government for the elites who latched on,” says Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor and co-author of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. “For the grassroots back then, it was about making sure the government didn’t spend on the wrong people. Rarely did anyone criticize Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits — the big-ticket items.” The biggest common theme, she says: “cracking down on immigration.”
Judy Woodruff and the late Gwen Ifill named Radcliffe medalists
February 7, 2017
Harvard Gazette | Radcliffe Day 2017, on May 26, will honor PBS journalists Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff. Harvard's Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor, will participate in the morning panel, "(Un)truths and Their Consequences," joined by A’Lelia Bundles '74, E.J. Dionne ’73, and Peggy Noonan. For more information about the day's events, which will be webcast live, see Radcliffe Day 2017.
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The Prophet of Profit
February 7, 2017
Slate | By Ray Fisman (Boston University) and Michael Luca (Harvard Business School). Betsy DeVos is right that some government services should be approached more like businesses. She’s wrong to think education is one of them, write Fisman and Luca.
"In understanding why different organizational forms have their distinct advantages, it’s useful to focus on the particular assumption that market participants can write a contract that ensures a good or service is delivered as expected," Fisman and Luca elaborate.
Interview Series: How Incomplete is the Theory of the Firm? Q&A with Daniel Carpenter
February 6, 2017
ProMarket—Stigler Center Blog | Should the economic theory of the firm be modified? In March, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Harvard Business School, and Oxford University will hold a conference on this topic. Ahead of the conference, the Stigler Center is launching an interview series with influential scholars in the field. First up: Daniel Carpenter, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government at Harvard.
Trump’s F.D.A. Pick Could Undo Decades of Drug Safeguards
February 5, 2017
The New York Times | Quoted: Daniel Carpenter, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government.
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Why Betsy DeVos’ vision of education does little to ensure equity
February 6, 2017
The Hechinger Report | By Natasha Kumar Warikoo (Ph.D. '05), Associate Professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education. "Betsy DeVos promotes a vision for society that outwardly extols the idea of equity but in reality does little to ensure it," writes Warikoo.
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Sovereignty and Survivance—The Pathways of Native Politics
December 28, 2016
Perspectives on Politics | By Daniel Carpenter, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government. Part of the journal's winter issue reflections symposium on the relative absence of Native American scholarship and issues in the discipline of political science.
View issue (Dec 2016)
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