Tobin 2023: Economics in Service to Society
Dear friends and colleagues,
Since our 2019 launch, the Tobin Center at Yale has supported economic research that advances nonpartisan, evidence-based solutions to benefit families, communities, and our nation. Working in collaboration with partners across public and private sectors and political affiliations, we reduce the time from research to impact with practical solutions.
The past 12 months have represented a landmark period of development and growth at the Tobin Center. Our year saw important new contributions to US policy, an expanded research portfolio, and the launch of innovative new partnerships with peers and government.
Select highlights of the year include:
We hosted Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen for a day, spotlighting Tobin’s distinct contributions to policy and announcing major new joint initiatives and partnerships with government in education, health, supply chain, childcare, climate, and economic mobility. Featuring congressional and state leaders, the event was in part live-streamed by the US Treasury Department.
We’ve supported key research on the impact of evictions; complexities and barriers to smart retirement savings; divergent future effects of climate change on different regions; the public health costs of aggressive public health restrictions; the impact of performance-based pay incentives in K-12 systems, and more.
Tobin Faculty Affiliates John Eric Humphries and Winnie van Dijk used big data to study the link between evictions and poverty in Chicago and New York City.
According to Education Next, Tobin Faculty Affiliate Barbara Biasi’s careful and creative research adds to the evidence that altering how teachers are evaluated and paid remains a powerful lever for improving student outcomes.
Prof. Zack Cooper’s Senate testimony helped spur bipartisan action in Congress on site-neutral billing while his research underpins new federal regulatory efforts to reverse rising health costs.
Working with faculty at the Yale School for the Environment and the Economics Department, we’re driving important new insights on grid infrastructure, EVs and biofuels, taking on one of the great policy challenges of the decade: implementation of generational federal investments in clean energy.
After helping situate Prof. Eli Fenichel at the White House, we supported a landmark national strategy (and earlier executive order) to appropriately include natural assets on the national balance sheet. Fifty years after Nobel Laureates Bill Nordhaus and James Tobin co-authored the seminal paper that introduced a new model for measuring economic growth that accounted for environmental damages, we convened experts and US officials to chart the path ahead.
Tobin’s Digital Economy Project is having an impact on policy trajectories in digital market regulation, leading a consensus global research agenda, advising Congress on key legislation, and shaping the conversation in the media.
With Profs. Chima Ndumele and Jacob Wallace, we’ve launched a public-private partnership with Connecticut Medicaid to improve quality, reduce costs and optimize solutions for CT residents, while advancing cutting edge research to benefit the nation.
Being of Service: Collaborating across Academia to Advance Practical Solutions
Tobin Center is part of an emerging community of solution-oriented enterprises in higher education. Tobin and our peers channel unique capacities in academia to address new and enduring social challenges. From our inception, we’ve seen the great potential of collaboration and partnership among peers in our growing field. This year we’ve taken major new steps that are yielding great results. These include:
- With Stanford’s SIEPR, a new effort to advance the use of evidence in the regulatory process, and co-hosting an event with the White House at a key juncture in regulatory policy.
- With Georgetown’s Massive Data Institute, we’ve launched a $5.5MM initiative to securely scale access to anonymized individual income data, an essential but often inaccessible key in policy evaluation and research.
- With JPAL at MIT, we’re enabling CT Medicaid to rapidly implement randomized control trials and form a unit dedicated to continually improve recipient outcomes and the administration of Medicaid.
- With Buffett Early Childhood Institute at U. Nebraska, we fielded a new survey of childcare providers, the latest iteration of what is the largest-ever survey of the US childcare workforce (results forthcoming).
Topline Stats
This year our work was covered in over 150 news stories (including New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Politico, NPR, and more), and we supported 15 faculty generating 16 new pieces of research, recruited 63 predocs supporting 65 faculty, placed 10 fellows in state government, and engaged in meaningful policy collaborations with 15 government agencies. Tobin-supported research was cited 18 times in this year’s Economic Report of President, in 6 White House initiative announcements, and many more agency citations. We co-hosted events the 3 Nobel Laureates, and met with 3 federal agency directors, 4 members of congress and 1 governor
This year we also opened Tobin Center’s new building, bringing together economics faculty under one roof and physically linking us to policy thinkers at Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
We sincerely thank our partners, faculty and supporters for another great year, and look forward to the year ahead.
- Steve Berry, Faculty Director
- Zack Cooper, Associate Faculty Director
- Dave Wilkinson, Executive Director
PS - More on the work of the Tobin Center and our wonderful colleagues can be found in this year’s Economics Magazine. In our efforts to ensure research is relevant, practical, and of service, we’ve been proud to support the design and launch of Yale’s new Data-Intensive Social Science Center (DISSC), led by DISSC Director (and Tobin Center Senior Fellow) Ron Borzekowski.