Professor, Yale University, President, Innovations for Poverty Action (New Haven, CT)

Dean Karlan’s nonprofit employs more than 400 employees working to alleviate poverty in countries around the world. “We conduct rigorous research to learn what works, what does not work, and why.”

In the Philippines, Karlan found that commitment savings accounts, which force self-control by restricting access to funds until a specific promise is fulfilled, help individuals save more. Karlan also learned how to structure commitment savings accounts to help people quit their vices—smoking, for example—with his website stickK.com.

Education Analyst, The World Bank (Washington, DC)

As part of the World Bank’s Education Unit, Myrna Machuca-Sierra designs and implements reading assessment programs in Pacific Island countries like Tonga, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea.

She does that primarily through the Pacific Early Grade Reading Assessment Initiative, a survey employed in more than 60 nations to help developing countries measure how well children are learning to read in early grades.

“The true policy impact of my work comes from making evidence-based research available to teachers and students in a way that becomes relevant and applicable to their daily lives.”

Lead Urban Economist, The World Bank (Washington, DC)

Stephen Karam helps countries define their development strategies and prepare investment projects.

“My joint degree in policy and Middle Eastern studies has given me the opportunity to improve housing programs in Morocco, open up property rights to women in Yemen, and improve the performance of local governments in Jordan.”

In Yemen, for example, a group of 240 families needed to be moved out of their settlement, which was in the direct path of flash floods. Karam helped create a plan to finance housing and infrastructure—including a center for social activities and work training—while preserving their tight ethnic community.

Director of Knowledge Management, Opportunity International (Oakbrook, IL)

Cell phone banking, agricultural finance, housing, and sanitation are just some of the development projects Estelle Berger investigates every day. “The goal is to gain a deeper understanding of what does or does not work and why in order for the organization and the industry to be more effective.”

As director of knowledge management, Berger researches and disseminates this information for Opportunity International’s microfinance banks.

“Development projects are difficult and prone to setbacks, so it’s encouraging when you see clients who have better livelihoods, secure savings, and children in school as a result of our programs.”

A new Harris School initiative links science and policy

Astronomy PhD student Reid Sherman likes exploring distant worlds. He’s doing thesis work on star formation and, every few months, travels to a radio telescope near the Sierra Nevada Mountains to get a closer look. Back on campus, he’s crossing another divide—the abyss between the physical and social sciences.

Unlike many of his peers, Sherman has little interest in becoming a professor. Instead, he’s exploring career options working with foundations or governments and took a public policy workshop last summer to beef up his resume. “I think scientific analysis is often missing in political issues,” he says. “There needs to be more interaction between scientists and policymakers.”

Many people at the University of Chicago would agree. They include scientists making breakthroughs in stem cell or climate change research; economists concerned with renewable resources or nuclear proliferation; and students looking for deeper insight on issues where energy, the environment, politics, and free markets intersect.

This fall, the Harris School established the Harris Energy Policy Institute as a place where these minds could meet. In addition to a specialized degree program and expanded curriculum, the School is hosting bimonthly faculty workshops and high-profile guest speakers to discuss nuclear policy and other scientific topics that shape our world. “It’s been historically difficult to link scientists and engineers with the folks who think about social and political  impacts,” says Robert Rosner, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University and director of HEPI. “If we’re going to take the next big step forward, we need to have all these people at the table.”

SINCE THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO was founded more than a century ago, scientific research has been an integral part of its academic community. Albert Michelson, the first American Nobel laureate, founded the Department of Physics at the turn of the 20th century, and 44 other Nobel laureates have since been associated with the Division of the Social Sciences, more than any other institution in the world.

Internationally recognized for his own work in astrophysics, Rosner left Harvard to join UChicago’s faculty in 1987. Fifteen years later, he was appointed chief scientist, and eventually director, at Argonne National Laboratory. The position required regular meetings in DC to discuss the lab’s role in improving state and national technology infrastructure. “The noise level in Washington is very high,” says Rosner, remembering the range of policymakers he encountered. “Some people are sophisticated and say things that are evidence-based, and then there are people who, well, I would be embarrassed to say some of those things at a cocktail party.”

He’s since crafted two strategies for better linking these science and policy worlds: First, to foster collaborative research between UChicago faculty in departments across campus. Second, to better train students—both in social and physical sciences—to become informed researchers and future policy leaders. When framed around those objectives, he says, establishing HEPI at the Harris School was a no-brainer.

“We shared the same mission,” agrees Harris School Deputy Dean Dan Black, remembering his early discussions with Rosner about developing the institute. “There is a web of connections between things like energy and climate change, job creation and industrial production in the United States. But we all have a mutual goal—to influence policy.”

IN A FOURTH-FLOOR conference room on campus, Rosner smiled beneath his round glasses as University staff and faculty took their seats. This workshop was just one of three held last summer to take inventory of science courses on campus and exchange research ideas. Rosner says holding similar gatherings once a month throughout the school year has been an essential part of getting the institute off the ground.

The faculty projects ranged from pragmatic policymaking to sci-fi laboratory experiments. Don Coursey, a Harris School economist, discussed water markets in New Mexico. Elisabeth Moyer, an assistant professor in geophysical sciences, explained her simulation project for studying climate change. Rosner said he’s developing software for high-speed computers that will model nuclear reactors, encouraging future experiments while reducing radioactive waste.

About two hours in, a researcher from Argonne National Laboratory raised the possibility of biologically engineering a virus that would only attack mosquitoes carrying malaria. “When you have something that’s killing 20 million people a year and you have a way to fix it,” he said, “I know a lot of people who would jump at that opportunity.”

Kennette Benedict, publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, raised concerns about the possible misuse of advances in life sciences, no matter how benign they may seem. “Science is responsibility and we have to think about the unintended consequences,” she warned.

Rosner smiled, invigorated by the discourse. This was exactly what he envisioned when he encouraged the Bulletin to relocate its office to the Harris School, where it moved in late September in concert with HEPI.

Founded in 1945 by a group of Manhattan Project scientists who were worried about nuclear proliferation, the magazine is known best for its Doomsday Clock and in-depth coverage of nuclear issues. The Bulletin has expanded its coverage in recent years to include other topics like climate change and biosecurity.

After living at the University for more than 60 years, the magazine moved to the Loop in 2007 before taking the Harris School’s offer to return. Now back on campus, the Bulletin will remain, as always, an independent entity—it will not represent the views of the University. But Rosner says having it so close to the Harris School will enrich policy discussions and provide a channel for HEPI to bring influential research to a wider audience in Washington.

“Having them in such close proximity will really add to our intellectual environment,” adds Black, who worked with the University provost’s office to orchestrate the agreement. “We’re looking forward to the opportunities that will come from having them here interacting with our students and faculty on a regular basis.” Benedict, for example, taught a course on nuclear policy this fall.

Additional energy-focused instructors like Benedict will help expand the Harris School’s current Environmental Science and Policy master’s degree, which for the past ten years has given policy students a strong foundation in science by letting them take classes in departments across campus. Meanwhile, physical science students can now formally enroll in a Harris School master’s degree (and possibly a future minor for undergraduates) designed specifically for burgeoning scientists who already have advanced math skills but want to study economics and the policymaking process.

Rocky Kolb, chair of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department, anticipates that many of his students will be interested in the specialized degree—especially those like Sherman planning a career in foundations, governments, and other organizations that interact with policy. “We weren’t serving them,” he explained during the faculty summer workshop. Last summer, he and Black tested the water by offering an experimental two-week policy seminar that more than a half-dozen physical science students attended. That’s a high turnout for any summer program, Kolb says.

“I’m not talking about armies of physical science graduate students crossing the Midway and invading the Harris School,” he clarifies. “But if just a handful become interested in this each year, over time it can have an enormous impact. We’re at a university for goodness’ sake, we have to take advantage of it.”

-Steven Yaccino

Curbing the cost of South African funerals

A local funeral parlor stands out among the otherwise austere  structures in Agincourt, a rural village in northeast South Africa. Tall and  rounded, it’s painted in a deep, eye-popping purple. “It’s clearly the most  successful business in town,” says Research Associate Alicia Menendez, who  first noticed the building while driving to a field site eight years ago. “I  thought it was a bar or club or something.”

More than any other rite of passage in South African life, funerals are driven by social pressure to uphold a family’s social status in the community. For many households, the financial outlay fosters a cycle of death and debt, jeopardizing the fiscal and physical health of already grieving families.

Typical burials require ornate coffins, burial plots, new clothes, chairs and tents for mourners, plus animals to sacrifice—cows for men, goats for women. Bereaved families are expected to host and feed relatives, who travel long distances to pay their respects, for several days. All told, Menendez and Princeton economist Anne Case estimate that the average cost to bury someone honorably in this area adds up to about 4,300 rand ($615)—equivalent to a staggering 40 percent of an average household’s total expenditures for the year.

Their research, to be published in the forthcoming book Explorations in the Economics of Aging (University of Chicago Press), uses data from 500 homes in Agincourt, finding a significant increase in symptoms of depression and anxiety as a direct result of funeral debt. This takes away money that could otherwise be spent on things like food, housing, and education. “It’s the families that have to pay,” Menendez explains. “M any people are leaving their households in such a financial mess that it totally compromises the well-being of their children.”

Such traditions were not always harmful to surviving family members. Historically, most deaths occurred in early childhood, not requiring lavish funerals,  or among the elderly, who are more likely to purchase some form of burial insurance.

But few younger adults plan for their own death, Menendez explains. In another working paper, she and Case analyzed some 3,800 funeral arrangements in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and found that 48 percent of deaths were due to the AIDS epidemic. “You see funerals happening every Saturday,” Menendez recalls from her last trip to the country. “People talk about going to funerals every weekend.”

The average South African in this area now dies around age 38, and many families left without breadwinners are also footing hefty medical and funeral bills. As a result, about one quarter of households have no choice but to borrow from moneylenders at monthly interest rates above 30 percent to pay for these funerals.

Engrained customs—especially ones that generate so much income for local businesses—take years to change and little progress has been made to curb the cost of funerals in spite of government efforts. By quantifying the effect funeral traditions have on the financial and physical health of families, Menendez hopes her research will help speed up that process. “It’s not going to happen overnight,” she says, pointing out the difficulty of telling a grieving family how they can and can’t honor their loved ones. “But this problem, it’s happening right now.”

Alicia Menendez
Research Associate
harrisschool.uchicago.edu/faculty/menendez

-Steven Yaccino

Michigan Avenue’s Niketown roared with the cheers of Aon employees, their families, clients, and members of the international media. The July 14 event, which Keegan emceed, marked the unveiling of the new Manchester United jersey, spurred by the June 2009 sponsorship contract between the soccer team and Chicagobased Aon Corporation, a leading provider of risk management and human resource solutions. The four-year, $130-million deal, which replaced longtime sponsor AIG, marks one of the highest sponsorship prices in soccer history—some five times more than any other team in the English Premier League.

As global chief marketing officer, Philip Clement, AM’93, MBA’93, manages the sponsorship for Aon and was a member of the team who secured the partnership—he was one of the two Aon executives who received the original jersey mock-up (CEO Greg Case was the other). After AIG’s financial meltdown in2008, Clement was strongly urged by members of Aon’s global executive committee to look into the sponsorship’s availability. Simultaneously, Manchester United was on the hunt for a global company with a solid balance sheet to help the team gain a foothold in new markets. Aon scored high on both counts. With more than 500 offices around the world, the company earned $747 million in net income for its stockholders in 2009, despite the turbulent economy.

Designed by Nike, and crafted out of recycled water bottles, the trademark red home shirt—Manchester United’s nickname is the “Red Devils”—now features the Aon logo in bold white letters. Its fabric is lighter than previous jerseys, and 200 tiny, laser-cut holes in spaces Nike calls “ventilation zones” allow air to pass across the torso. “I am probably more than a little bit biased on  this,” admits Clement, one of only five people who saw the final jersey before it was unveiled, “but I see it as a piece of modern art.”

More importantly, Aon hopes teaming up with what is perhaps the world’s most famous team will finally boost its brand awareness, says Clement, who has been trying to increase the company’s global recognition since he took the position in 2005. “Some organizations make decisions like this based on what I would call almost a religious belief that sponsorship is good,” he explains, pointing to the benefits of his econometrics training at the Harris School. “[Our] decision had to be made by numbers.”

With more than six million Manchester United jerseys sold around the world each year, those numbers spoke loud and clear. The team “has 333 million fans globally,” Clement explains, “more than every man, woman, and child in the United States, Canada, and Australia.”

Clement and his team have since joined the ranks of other full-fledged Red Devil fans—almost 300 employees were at the July 14 jersey unveiling at Niketown, and hundreds of others were at simultaneous parties around the world. That day, Clement notes, the hits on Aon’s website went up 176 percent.

The company also introduced a new slogan, “Aon United,” marking the beginning of a five-year plan to unify recent acquisitions like human resources consulting firm Hewitt Associates, which Aon bought in July. “The notion of how to bring a firm together globally around one theme, one idea, was difficult and pretty evasive,” Clement adds, “until something like Manchester United came up.”

Philip Clement
Global Chief Marketing and Communications Officer
Aon Corporation

-Ruthie Kott

Predicting the idiosyncrasies of political ideology

When Republican Scott Brown beat out Democrat Martha Coakley to win Ted Kennedy’s open Massachusetts Senate seat last January, conservatives rejoiced. As the critical 41st vote needed to enact a filibuster, Brown would be the linchpin Republicans needed to derail Democratic initiatives in Washington. Less than two months later, the new player shocked his cheerleaders by voting for a $15-billion Obama stimulus bill that gave tax cuts to companies  for hiring new employees—the GOP denounced the measure as fiscally irresponsible. Shouts of “traitor” resounded throughout the conservative media.

Political scientist Boris Shor wasn’t the least bit surprised. Even before Brown was elected, the Harris School assistant professor had predicted he would be one of the more liberal Republicans in Congress. Using voting records from state legislatures and responses to a political positions survey, Shor has devised a novel system for ideological mapping that allows him to predict how candidates like Brown will behave in Congress—before they get there. After all, he says, “it’s not enough to know what someone’s party label is,” you have to know where he or she falls on the liberal-conservative spectrum.“People are pretty consistent in their ideological predispositions across their entire careers,” says Shor. That consistency allows him to compare state legislators running for Congress against current Senators and map them on a common scale. Unbeknownst to Tea Party proponents celebrating Brown’s victory in January, he says, the Senator-elect had a history that placed him near Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, previously Congress’s most left-leaning Republican.

To see where Congressional candidates really stand, Shor starts with roll-call votes from state legislatures, the “farm team for Congress.” Many members of Congress—for example, Barack Obama—hone their political chops as state lawmakers, leaving behind a permanent record of their ideological leanings. By tracking their voting patterns, Shor can determine how liberal or conservative a candidate is within his or her state.

The challenge arises when he tries to compare across states. After all, different states vote on different legislation. How do you rank a lawmaker who’s never voted on concealed firearms, for instance, against one who has? “It’s like I’ve got Celsius in one place and Fahrenheit in another,” Shor says. “I can’t compare the two even though they’re both temperature rankings.”

To find common ground, he incorporates opinion data from the National Political Awareness Test. Conducted  by Project Vote Smart, a nonpartisan voter education organization, the survey asks state and federal candidates about a variety of issues, including same-sex marriage, abortion, and other controversial policies. Because these legislators answer the same questions, Shor can map them in a common ideological space. He then uses those nationwide results to compare state-by-state scores, gleaned from the roll-call voting data, on a single scale.

The mapping system also offers a more accurate picture of the American electorate. Take the recent midterm runoff in West Virginia’s First congressional district. When Mike Oliverio, a state senator since 1993, defeated longtime incumbent Alan Mollohan in May’s Democratic primary, commentators chalked it up simply to anti-incumbent sentiment and corruption charges swirling around Mollohan. What Shor noticed, however, was the deeper “sea change in ideology” that Oliverio represents—he ultimately lost the seat to Tea Party-backed Republican candidate David McKinley.

“He’s such an outlier in his party,” says Shor, who rated Oliverio in the 96th percentile for conservatism out of all West Virginia Democrats from the past decade. His election would have made Oliverio the most conservative Democrat in Congress. The outcome would have signaled a significant shift to the right for traditionally Democratic West Virginia.

“It’s important to know the types of people winning elections” regardless of party, says Shor. “We want to understand how liberal or conservative state legislators are as individuals because what they believe ideologically determines a lot of the policies that they attempt to pass.”

Boris Shor
Assistant Professor
harrisschool.uchicago.edu/faculty/shor

-Brooke E. O’Neill

Museum Minded

In a recent paper, Senior Lecturer Betty Farrell argues that museums need to become more welcoming to minority and younger visitors if they want to stay relevant. She suggests ways to reorganize their programming to appeal to broader audiences.

Seizing the Moment

Using game theory modeling, Associate Professor Ethan Bueno de Mesquita looks at revolutionary leaders and violence as a tool for exaggerating antigovernment sentiments, finding that both are effective only in societies already likely to experience regime change.

A Long Way to Go

When Deputy Dean Dan Black set out to quantify the economic progress African Americans have made in the United States, he found that significant racial disparities remain ubiquitous in the labor market and financial well-being stayed relatively stagnant over the past 40 years.

How Fast Is Fear?

After looking at data from the 2003 SARS outbreak in Taiwan, Assistant Professor Daniel Bennett tracks how quickly fear of clinics spread—they were perceived as high-risk places.

Losing More Than a Job

Investigating barriers that prevent children from eventually obtaining post secondary degrees,Professor Ariel Kalil found parental job loss plays a major role in education outcomes. For black families, that association is almost three times as strong.

Check out more faculty research at harrisschool.uchicago.edu/research.

In December 2009, Mexican President Felipe Calderón instructed his federal secretaries to eliminate all regulations that impede economic growth. Just months later, as Mexico began rolling out these new policies, 10 Harris School MPP students were tasked with helping the country’s Ministry of Economy examine the projected impact of these reforms. A final draft of their paper with these calculations will be released this winter.

POLICY: As part of a series of measures for fiscal simplification, a new online tax payment system will soon be implemented to help businesses across Mexico.

PAPER: Students pegged the compliance costs of taxation, including the time individuals spend preparing and filing forms, at around 160 billion Mexican pesos ($13 billion)*. Online payment reform would bring that number down slightly, creating about 512 million pesos ($41 million) in savings over the next three years—one one-thousandth of the total tax-paying compliance cost.

POLICY: Administrative simplification for public and private borrowers who participate in Banobras, an infrastructure loan program, is currently being executed.

PAPER: Students estimated that switching to an online system yielded savings of some 104.3 billion pesos ($8.5 billion), making Mexico’s proposed reforms equal to four years worth of project loan disbursements from Banobras by 2035.

POLICY: Last summer, Mexico’s new Regulatory Impact Assessments—internal government evaluations of new regulation—took effect. PAPER: Students compared RIAs in Mexico to other OECD countries. Overall, they found the changes effective and adhering to international trends.

PAPER: Students compared RIAs in Mexico to other OECD countries. Overall, they found the changes effective and adhering to international trends.

POLICY: When Calderón announced 12 measures for improving regulation and promoting competitiveness in Mexico in late August, the first one he mentioned was simplifying the process for obtaining a “certificate of origin” for exporting goods and services to the EU and Latin America.

PAPER: Students estimated savings associated with the reform proposed by Mexico, finding it would reduce the documentation preparation days from seven to 6.25—a 10.5 percent decrease.

*All Mexican Peso to U.S. Dollar conversions reflect November 2010 rates.