Jens Ludwig, Ph.D.

Jens Ludwig is a professor of Social Service, Law, and Public Policy in the School of Social Service Administration and an Affiliate Professor in the Harris School.

Jens Ludwig is a professor of Social Service, Law, and Public Policy in the School of Social Service Administration and an Affiliate Professor in the Harris School. He also serves as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and co-director of the NBER's working group on the economics of crime. His research focuses on social policy, particularly in the areas of urban poverty, education, crime, and housing policy.

In the area of urban poverty, Ludwig has participated since 1995 on the evaluation of a HUD-funded randomized residential-mobility experiment known as Moving to Opportunity (MTO), which provides low-income public housing families the opportunity to relocate to private-market housing in less disadvantaged neighborhoods. Ludwig's research on education covers a range of topics from early education to school-to-work transition. His study of the long-term effects of Head Start (co-authored with Douglas Miller) was recently published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, while his co-authored article on race, peer norms, and education with Philip Cook was awarded the 1997 Vernon Prize for best article by the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM). Ludwig has also been actively involved in research on a variety of crime issues, particularly on the topic of gun violence. He is the co-author with Duke University professor Philip J. Cook of an evaluation of the federal Brady Act published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as of the book Gun Violence: The Real Costs (Oxford University Press, 2000), and co-editor with Cook of Evaluating Gun Policy (Brookings Institution Press, 2003).

Prior to coming to the Harris School, Ludwig was a professor of public policy at Georgetown University. He is currently a member of the editorial boards of Criminology, the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. He has served as the Andrew Mellon Visiting Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, and as a visiting scholar to the Northwestern University / University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research, and is an elected member of APPAM's policy council (board of directors). Ludwig received his B.A. in economics from Rutgers College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Duke University. In 2006 he was awarded APPAM's David N. Kershaw Prize for Distinguished Contributions to Public Policy by Age 40.