Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group Progress Report Grant ID INO1100038 January, 2013 PROGRESS REPORT 2 HCEO OVERVIEW 6 Human Capital and Economic Opportunity MEMBERS 11 Global Working Group NETWORKS 25 WORKING PAPERS 33 Table of Contents EVENTS 56 CONFERENCE 121 SUMMARIES WEBCONFERENCES 176 DISSEMINATION 191 CONTACT 230 INFORMATION www.hceconomics.org 1 2 . . . . 3 . . 4 5 Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group Group Overview and Vision The Institute for New Economic Thinking was established to nurture a global community of next- generation economic leaders, to provoke new economic thinking, and to inspire the economics profession to engage the challenges of the 21st century. Early on, INET recognized inequality as a crucial aspect of these challenges and funded a working group specifically to study inequality--its origins, its consequences for individuals, and its relationships to economic stability and growth worldwide. The Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group brings together an international community of world-class scholars and practitioners to study and report on the determinants of inequality and its consequences, with particular emphasis on how economic, social, educational and health policies affect life outcomes and economic development. The Global Working Group is uniquely comprehensive in its scope and its inclusion of diverse points of view. Our research goes beyond the traditional focus on redistribution through taxes and transfers as the primary means of reducing inequality. We consider predistribution—understanding policies that promote the capabilities that allow persons and societies to flourish. Our concept of flourishing is inclusive and draws on notions and findings from philosophy, epidemiology, economics, psychology, genetics, and anthropology, including, but not confined to, traditional policies of redistribution. We are creating an international research community that explores ideas and conducts research that ranges over a wide field of knowledge. The title of the network reflects this comprehensive vision. Our focus on human capital refers to our concern about the capabilities of individuals, be it their cognitive skills and education, personality traits, or basic biology. Economic opportunity is a basic focus and we examine how outcomes are determined by the social, political and economic contexts in which individuals function. The Global Working Group represents an endeavor that fundamentally differs from conventional research networks in the academic world: it aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of human flourishing. While there are substantial bodies of research on individual determinants of human flourishing, the Global Working Group’s objective of providing a unification of these components places its research goals outside the domain of conventional social science, which has too often either reduced the domain of research to small questions with easy answers or has proposed facile, monocausal explanations of complex phenomena. The Global Working Group accepts the inherent complexity of understanding human flourishing. By integrating individuals across disciplines and promoting inter- and trans-disciplinary collaborations, the Global Working Group assumes a very different form compared to conventional research environments. Our objective in this regard is to create a scientific infrastructure for international research collaboration that unites alternative perspectives, methodologies and fields, in order to allow for an integrated understanding of socioeconomic failure and success. We have organized the Working Group into distinct research networks. The six active networks are: early childhood intervention; family inequality; health inequality; identity and personality; inequality: measurement, interpretation, and policy; and markets. These networks have been established in order to facilitate exchange of ideas on more focused topics relevant to the general www.hceconomics.org 6 Group Overview and Vision, continued group. Our integrative vision requires understanding specific aspects of human flourishing. The networks are permeable in the sense that a member of one network is in principle welcome to participate in the activities of any other. We are developing ways to facilitate inter-network activities. The networks have already held on-site and web-based workshops on specific topics of importance to the overall initiative. We are also in the processing of considering the formation of additional networks as our understanding of human flourishing evolves. The current group of network members reflects choices made by the network leaders as well as suggestions made by the Working Group leaders. Network leaders are actively seeking new members and have been asked to suggest individuals to cross networks. We have endeavored to make sure that a rich set of alternative methods and perspectives is included in each network. One objective of the Working Group’s directors is to make sure that the overall project involves the world’s leading researchers regardless of research style and/or focus. We believe that interactions among contrasting research approaches is fruitful. This belief has been justified in our activities over the past year. We strongly oppose prejudging any research on criteria other than quality. The network membership reflects a desire to integrate biological, sociological, and psychological perspectives into traditionally economic questions such as labor market success or failure. Each of these perspectives is essential to the development of a broad understanding of human flourishing. At the same time, we wish to demonstrate how policy models developed in economics can enrich research in other social science disciplines. The membership of the networks mixes younger and more mature scholars with the intent of fostering the next generation of scholars in an interdisciplinary style of research. There is one sense in which the Global Working Group takes a particular methodological stance. We place priority on treating social science research as an empirical endeavor. This does not mean that theoretical research is unwelcome. We defend the value of formal theory in facilitating the understanding of socioeconomic phenomena. Rather, our view is that social science advances when theories are subjected to rigorous testing to allow corroboration or falsification. It also advances when a rigorous data base on the economy and society is available. We treat theory, statistical methodology, and empirical analysis as equal partners in our research enterprise. For this reason our membership includes researchers that range from economic and econometric theorists to empirical researchers whose work focuses on data construction and description. A corollary of our methodological stance is that we regard the assumptions as well as the implications of any theory as subject to empirical evaluation and potential rejection. Our desire to influence the direction of scholarship in the future is reflected in the Working Group’s initiation of an annual Summer School on Socioeconomic Inequality for graduate students. The this summer school series will bring together top graduate students from around the world to hear lectures by world class scholars on state-of-the-art research on aspects of economic and social inequality and to expose them to the broad perspectives that define the initiative. The first summer school was held at the University of Chicago in July 2012 and included outstanding graduate students from the US and Europe. In addition, we are in working with the China Center for Economic Research to establish a summer school on inequality in Beijing, China, which will be held in June 2013. This will create an extraordinary opportunity to produce collaborative activities between Chinese and Western scholars as well as open up new dimensions of inequality research. 7 Group Overview and Vision, continued We see the output of the Global Working Group as emerging at three levels. First, we expect the Working Group, via the individual research programs of network members, to push the scientific frontiers on the understanding of human flourishing. We expect this new research will often be trans-disciplinary and at a minimum, the members of the Working Groups will be broader and more creative scholars for having participated. This output is of course intangible, but its importance should not be underestimated. Second, through the establishment of summer schools and the development of collaborative activities with existing organizations such as the various nationally funded poverty and demography research institutes in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, we intend to create an invisible college of researchers on human flourishing. Third, the Global Working Group will produce a monograph series on human flourishing in the 21st century. We have come to an agreement with Oxford University Press to establish such a series. These books will not represent summaries of particular research programs, but rather syntheses of different aspects of human flourishing, written at a level that is scientifically rigorous. 8 Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group Summary of Activities Winter 2010-2011 Spring 2012 November 10 – Becker Friedman Institute for Research April 20-21 –Investing in Early Childhood: A Global in Economics (University of Chicago) agrees to partner Perspective on the Interplay