2025 College and University Fund Lecture Series
About the Lecture
For decades, Harvard professor Lawrence Katz has worked with federal and local housing agencies to learn how public housing policy might more effectively support economic opportunity. This lecture will cover his work on 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. Professor Katz’s pathbreaking work on these projects demonstrates how collaborations between researchers and government agencies can improve the delivery of important public goods and services.
About the Speaker
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).
Katz 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. His past research has explored a wide range of topics including U.S. and comparative wage inequality trends, educational wage differentials and the labor market returns to education, the impact of globalization and technological change on the labor market, the economics of immigration, unemployment and unemployment insurance, regional labor markets, the evaluation of workforce training and other 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. He is the current President of the American Economic Association, the Co-Founder and past Co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America, past President of the Society of Labor Economists, and has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. He 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.
Speakers
About the Lecture Series
For more than 100 years, the Social Science Research Council has mobilized policy-relevant social and behavioral science aimed at finding actionable solutions to pressing societal challenges. In this year’s virtual lecture series, we’ll hear about successful research collaborations between federal, state, and local government agencies and faculty on the 86 campuses in the Social Science Research Council’s College and University Fund for the Social Sciences institutional membership consortium. These collaborations, which have led to improved outcomes for communities, give us a blueprint for delivering on the promise of government innovation.
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