Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy
Harvard Kennedy School
Faculty Dean of Kirkland House, Harvard College
Research
Education, Skills, Inequality
I am an economist who studies education, skills, inequality, and the future of work. My early career research focused on the long-run impacts of schooling on later life outcomes. I have also written several papers about higher education expansion in the U.S., including “free college” plans.
More recently, I have become interested in how work is changing to place greater emphasis on “soft skills” like teamwork, social perceptiveness, decision-making, and adaptability. My work is data-driven, ranging from secondary analysis of large-scale data to lab and field experiments. You can find non-technical versions of my work by reading Forked Lightning - my Substack newsletter, my columns in the New York Times or other media listed on my research page. Here is a short version of my academic CV.
In 2022, I was awarded the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to Labor Economics. The prize announcement was published in the Journal of Labor Economics.
Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy
I am a faculty affiliate of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. The Wiener Center is a community of faculty, students, research fellows, and staff working on pressing social policy issues in areas such as health care, criminal justice, inequality, education, and labor markets. We support research and bring together communities of policy and practice around these issues. Here are links to our current news and events and our core faculty.
Kirkland House
Harvard College
Janine Santimauro and I are the faculty deans of Kirkland House, one of the 12 undergraduate houses of Harvard college. Kirkland is a close-knit, multi-generational community of faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and staff. We have many wonderful traditions, ranging from Conversations with Kirkland to Fridays with Faculty to Secret Santa.
Harvard Project on Workforce
The Project on Workforce is a cross-Harvard collaboration that seeks to build better and smoother pathways from education and training institutions into the labor market. We conduct basic and applied research on education and workforce development issues and communicate regularly with leaders in business, education, and policy. Here is our team, and a list of our current projects.
