Admitted students are invited to join world-class faculty from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy to learn about their research on key topics in the field of international policy and development.

Explore and register for the events below:

IPD Faculty Insight with Austin Wright- Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data

Thursday, June 10, 9–10 a.m.

Please join us for an international Policy Development Faculty Insight session with Assistant Professor Austin Wright on Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data. His study found that partisanship, socio-political isolation, proximity to chapters of the Proud Boys organization, and local activity on Parler are robustly associated with protest participation on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC.

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s Books with Professor Anjali Adukia

Friday, May 7, 2021

Watch the Webinar: What We Teach About Race and Gender (51 min.)

Books shape how children learn about society and social norms, in part through the representation of different characters. To better understand the messages children encounter in books, we introduce new machine-led methods for systematically converting images into data. We apply these image tools, along with established text analysis methods, to measure the representation of race, gender, and age in children’s books commonly found in US schools and homes over the last century. We find that books selected to highlight people of color, or females of all races, have increasingly over time depicted characters with darker skin tones; "mainstream" books, by contrast, over the last two decades have increasingly depicted chromatically ambiguous characters with an increase in lighter skin tones. Children are consistently depicted with lighter skin than adults, despite no systematic differences in skin tones by age. Comparing images and text, we find that females are more represented in images than in text. There is a persistent disproportionate representation of males, particularly White males, and lighter-skinned people relative to darker-skinned people. Our data provide a view into the "black box" of education through children’s books in US schools and homes, highlighting what has changed and what has endured.

Oligarchs and Ownership Chains: Political Economy in Ukraine Before and After the Orange Revolution

Fri., February 26, 2021

Watch the Webinar: Oligarchs and Ownership Chains: Political Economy in Ukraine Before and After the Orange Revolution (55 min.)

Scott Gehlbach, a political economist and comparativist will share recent research with John S. Earle, Solomiya Shpak, and Anton Shirikov, where they link information from investigative journalists on the key holdings of numerous Ukrainian oligarchs with firm-level administrative data on formal ownership ties to examine defensive ownership.

Computational Methods for Measuring Drug Trafficking Organizations

Fri., February 05, 2021

Watch the Webinar: Computational Methods for Measuring Drug Trafficking Organizations (59 min.)

Fernanda Sobrino Macias, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy will discuss an empirical model to assess when criminal groups enter a new territory and compete with others, and when such behavior produces violent outcomes.

Investing in Accelerating COVID-19 Vaccine Access

Fri., January 15, 2021

Watch the Webinar: Investing in Accelerating COVID-19 Vaccine Access (1 hr. 5 min.)

Michael Kremer is a University Professor in economics and public policy at the University of Chicago, and the founding director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics. In 2019, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.

This talk will discuss vaccine policies during pandemics, arguing that the social value of early and large scale installation of vaccine manufacturing capacity is huge relative to the private returns and examining ways that governments can spur such investment. It will discuss the case of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as lessons to help address future pandemics