News

The SSRC seeks a postdoctoral fellow to join a research team aimed at producing estimates of the Marginal Value of Public Funds for a set of programs related to criminal justice policy. The team will be led by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Oregon and will have access to analyst support. The policies and programs of interest include summer youth employment, cognitive behavioral therapy programs, and potentially others.

The SSRC announces the launch of its newest initiative, the Policy ROI Project. The Policy ROI Project will produce rigorous and reliable measures of the net social returns for groups of alternative criminal justice policies, like summer youth employment programs and cognitive behavioral therapy programs. The project team will produce estimates of each policy’s Marginal Value of Public Funds, a measure that reports the net social benefit produced by each additional dollar of public funds spent on a given policy.

A renewed focus on government efficiency has drawn increased attention to the critically important public goods and services provided by federal, state and local governments. Many government agencies lack the capacity to innovate, test, and implement more cost-effective ways to achieve their goals. In this lecture series, we’ll hear about successful research collaborations between federal, state, and local government agencies and faculty with the campuses in the Council’s university consortium.

The SSRC is pleased to announce that Ingela Alger has joined its Board of Directors. Ingela Alger is a CNRS Senior Researcher (DR1) at the Toulouse School of Economics. Her research, which has been published in journals such as American Economic Review, Econometrica, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, focuses on the evolutionary foundations of human preferences, when these are transmitted from generation to generation and are subject to selection.

In December, the SSRC brought together leaders from member institutions of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences, along with representatives from public and private research funders, to discuss current opportunities to partner with federal, state, and local agencies to build government capacity to improve the delivery of public goods and services. These opportunities include new sources of funding to build shared administrative data infrastructures and evaluate the impacts of government policies and programs.

Frontiers in Social and Behavioral Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.

A new memo published by the Federation of American Scientists, coauthored by SSRC President Anna Harvey, proposes a bold initiative to establish a nationwide network of university-based policy innovation labs in every state.

Drawing inspiration from the success of the Agriculture Experiment Stations created under the Hatch Act of 1887—which boosted local agricultural productivity by 6%—the memo argues that partnerships between local governments and universities are the most effective way to foster government innovation, through the rigorous evaluation of public programs and the implementation of evidence-based policy reforms.