Scientific programs are intellectual communities that draw together investigators pursuing a common problem, or different problems using a common approach--that is, to share ideas about advancing knowledge in their area and to identify and organize collaborative research projects. Listed here are some of our ongoing and recent scientific initiatives:
Focuses on research designed to solve U.S. public health problems by marshalling the previously untapped interdisciplinary efforts of scholars in political science, sociology, and economics. We house eight Robert Wood Johnson visiting postdoctoral scholars each year for this prestigious two-year fellowship program. Current research underway is the comparison of how citizens synthesize information provided by the mass media and public opinion about the privatization of health care, religious influence on health and health care decisions, prevention of child obesity with physical education requirements, link between health investments and economic mobility, the exploration of the reciprocal links between society and public health, and social policy in advanced industrialized countries. The Institute supplements these efforts with several scholars focused on the problems of global health. In addition, we are currently conducting a major design and evaluation study of the new Mexican health care system. The health policy program is led by Professor Katherine Swartz with a steering committee that includes Professors James Alt, Daniel Carpenter, Paul Cleary, David Cutler, Jennifer Hochschild, Gary King, Peter Marsden, Thomas McGuire, Joseph Newhouse, Mary Ruggie, and Mary Waters.
Our flagship research which includes a wide variety of projects that develop innovative methods and software with the ultimate goal of building and unifying the methodological subfields existing now separately within most social science disciplines. This program is led by Institute Director, Gary King. See our Social Science Statistics Blog
The broad purpose of this program is to encourage and facilitate research and instruction in the theory and practice of survey research. The Program on Survey Research at The Institute will serve as a resource for anyone interested in research and development in scientific survey methods and will offer a university-wide clearinghouse for information and expertise in survey design, administration and analysis. The program will also foster useful relationships among scholars across a diversity of departments and schools at Harvard University , and will promote and coordinate interdisciplinary research activities. This program is led by Assistant Professor of Government, D. Sunshine Hillygus. The executive committee includes distinguished survey scholars from across Harvard University: James Hammit (HSPH), Peter Marsden (Dept. of Sociology), Pippa Norris (KSG), Sidney Verba (Dept. of Government), Kip Viscusi (Law School), and Alan Zaslavsky (HMS).
Geographic analysis is a way of thinking about research problems in both the natural and social realm. Its roots trace back to the ancient sciences of geography and cartography through to modern statistics and remote sensing. A quickly growing area which crosses many disciplinary boundaries, it includes projects in the Social Sciences (Demographic Forecasting), Public Health (Design and Evaluation of the Mexican Health Care System project; Neighborhood effects on the presentation, treatment, and course of cancer in the elderly), History (Administrative and Demographic Change in Chinese History) and Humanities (Mapping of the Cultural Landscape of Africa), and programs throughout Landscape Design and Urban Planning, and the Environmental Sciences.
The Harvard Geospatial Library, the catalog and repository of geospatial data held by Harvard University has been earmarked as the foundation on which to build a university wide main technology platform for this program and all areas of teaching and research employing geospatial analysis. The steering committee, led by Peter Bol, Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations will be comprised of faculty from the Harvard School of Public Health, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Graduate School of Design, and Division of Engineering and Applied Science.
Fundamental research in psychology and economics has uncovered important, sometimes counter-intuitive, drivers of human behavior. The Policy Design Initiative (PDI) attempts to couple these insights with an understanding of ground realities, so as to craft novel programs and policies. Our innovations have their intellectual roots in the emerging discipline of “behavioral economics.” A large body of psychology research informs us of the subtle ways that context can dramatically affect behavior and of subtle psychological factors that lead people away from rational or far-sighted choices. Behavioral economics seeks to incorporate these insights into economic contexts. Our design work therefore focuses on levers that traditional economics and policy approaches often overlook.
A major drive behind this project is the belief that current research and implementation efforts in the social sector are too often separated from each other. We use insights from our research to generate practical and testable innovations, and then subject these insights to careful evaluation. The outcome of our work is both new scientific knowledge and workable new products and policies.
The research complement to our Ph.D. program in political economy, this work focuses on political and economic institutions and behavior within a formal theoretical framework. It is the marriage of political science and economics, emphasizing the reciprocal influence of politics on economic organization and equilibrium behavior and of economics on political structure and calculation. Economic phenomena and political phenomena are simultaneously enriched within a political-economic framework and are explained by a common optimization perspective.
Current research explores the models of formal institutions with a focus on the interface between politics and demography, the macroeconomics of consumption and spending, behavioral economics, international political economy, game theory in negotiations, auctions and herding behavior, and the rating and selection mechanisms of college admissions.
Demography may not be destiny, but it surely sets important constraints on what is feasible and desirable in the broader social, economic and political world. Professor Kenneth Shepsle heads this program and employs the methodology of overlapping-generations game theory to model intergenerational group phenomena that unfold over time involving agents of different ages, experience in the group, and time left till they depart. In each period the group must make decisions that require costs to be borne and yield benefits to be enjoyed. How those are distributed -- who enjoys the benefits and who bears the costs -- will determine the group's success.
This research aims to produce a general model that provides explanations for empirical facts in a number of realms. Empirical applications include seniority systems in legislatures, term-limited office holders, tenure systems in universities, age-grading regimes in tribes, and pension schemes in developed economies. In addition to providing explanations for existing regularities, the research also seeks to determine what “shocks” will undermine intergenerational understandings (particularly demographic shocks like changes in fertility and mortality and immigration).
The Boston Research Consortium (BRC) is an innovative research concept designed to create an intra-university collaborative of Harvard faculty and students whose common goal is to conduct scholarly research on and about Boston and the Greater Boston area. The Consortium aims to generate the creative, technical, and administrative structure needed to support and harness the combined efforts of Harvard's talented researchers, while stimulating outreach, participation, and communication with the Greater Boston community. It is cooperative effort of IQSS and the Rappaport Institute, led by Professor Christopher Winship. Core faculty participants include Professors Lisa Berkman, Nicholas Christakis, Gary King, Ed Glaeser, Steve Gortmaker, Robert Sampson, and Richard Murnane. The BRC's website is currently under construction, but you may access the entire proposal text here.
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