Chris Roth won the CESifo Distinguished Affiliate Award in Employment and Social Protection for his paper on Beliefs about Racial Discrimination and Support for Pro-Black Policies. In this joint work with Ingar Haaland (University of Bergen), he shows that Democrats and Republicans differ substantially in their beliefs about the extent of hiring discrimination against blacks. While these differences become smaller as people are exposed to scientific evidence, this does not lead to a similar convergence in support for pro-black policies to combat racial discrimination.
Together with Simon Jäger (MIT) and Benjamin Schoefer (UC Berkeley), Chris also successfully applied for inclusion of survey questions in the SOEP Innovation Sample (SOEP IS), which offers great potential as a source of household micro-data, particularly for researchers seeking specific information on households or on people’s opinions.
Matt Lowe was awarded a grant by the International Growth Centre in support of the delivery of the IGC India (Bihar) program funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He will use the funds for a joint project on “Norm Transmission among Bureaucrats” with Ray Fisman (Boston University) and Nishith Prakash (University of Connecticut).