Event

The inaugural lecture in the Council’s 2025 lecture series on government innovation will cover Professor Lawrence Katz’s pathbreaking work with federal and local housing agencies to learn how public housing policy might more effectively support economic opportunity. This lecture will discuss three landmark projects: Moving to Opportunity, enabling residents of public housing to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods; Creating Moves to Opportunity, providing additional support to families considering leaving high-poverty neighborhoods; and HOPE VI revitalization grants, investing in mixed-income developments in neighborhoods with distressed public housing.

In this lecture, Esther Duflo shares her experience working in collaboration with policymakers in the developing world, and highlight the critical role of bringing a “plumbing” mindset to policy-relevant research: a mindset where policymakers realize that any program has so many dimensions that it is very difficult to get them all right, and where there is a need for constant experimentation and tinkering for policies to reach their full potential.

In this Research to Solve Problems lecture, Duncan J. Watts (University of Pennsylvania) will explore some of the challenges faced by social and behavioral scientists in reconciling conflicting findings, or findings from studies conducted in different contexts, and consider whether those challenges are rooted in the traditional approach to the research process. He will outline an alternative approach, “integrative experimental design,” which puts generalizability considerations first in the process of experimental design, and illustrate this approach using an example from research on teams.

May 23rd, 2024 | 2:00 PM Eastern

In this installment of our Research to Solve Problems lecture series, Eva Vivalt (University of Toronto) will discuss her research conducted with policymakers, practitioners, and researchers at World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank workshops. The results illustrate how each of these three groups respond to and weigh evidence when it is presented to them, and which types of evidence policymakers tend to weigh more heavily.

April 18th, 2024 | 2:00 PM Eastern
In this installment of our Research to Solve Problems lecture series, Donald Moynihan (Georgetown University) will discuss how social and behavioral scientists interested in the applied study of public services can think about ways for their research to have an impact. Professor Moynihan will draw from his experience studying government processes to discuss the purposeful framing of public problems, and how researchers can design solutions of interest to policymakers.

March 14th, 2024 | 2:00 PM EDT
In this installment of our Research to Solve Problems lecture series, Cyrus Samii (New York University) will discuss how political science researchers can take a problem-solving approach to orienting their work toward social issues. Drawing on a recent book chapter, he’ll describe how empirical political scientists can look for and define problems, and a step-by-step process to help researchers pick the right methodological tools to go from descriptive to causal analysis and intervention testing to solutions.