Search Fellows | Russell Sage Foundation

Jason Brent

Duke University

Visiting Researcher

Jason Brent will work on a book examining the now largely forgotten effort at mass economic education to improve American’s understanding of the U.S. economy by the American Economic Association (AEA) in the 1960s.

Rogers Brubaker

University of California, Los Angeles

Visiting Researcher

Rogers Brubaker will work on a book that brings together literatures on populism, technocracy, digital governance, and digital infrastructures. The premise of the book is that digital infrastructures, including increasingly powerful forms of generative and agentic AI, are transforming politics and governance in fundamental ways by enabling and promoting new forms of populism and technology. These trends, previously seen as antithetical to one another, are increasingly seen as having a symbiotic relationship based on the perceived weakening efficacy of the two major political parties.

Zoltan Hajnal

University of California, San Diego

Visiting Researcher

Zoltan Hajnal will work on a series of articles and a book investigating whether changing the timing of local elections impacts policy and, ultimately, reduces economic inequality. At different times over the past decade, six states have shifted from off-cycle local elections, where the only items on the ballot are local contests, to on-cycle local elections, which are held on the same day as federal contests.

Hilary Hoynes

University of California, Berkeley

Visiting Researcher

Hilary Hoynes will work on a series of papers examining the effects of welfare reform in the United States on children’s long-term social and economic outcomes. She will revisit five randomized experiments conducted by MDRC in the years leading up to the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. In these experiments, welfare recipients were separated into two groups: one group would experience welfare reform policies and the other would continue to receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children program benefits.

Daniel S. Nagin

Carnegie Mellon University

Visiting Researcher

Daniel Nagin will work on a book that examines bystander intervention and decision-making. He will integrate research on “reactive guardianship,” in which bystanders intervene in crimes in progress, and “proactive guardianship,” in which potential offenders are deterred from attempting a crime due to the risk of bystander intervention.

Jon Tebes

University of Notre Dame

Visiting Researcher

Jon Tebes will work on a project that examines how alternate forms of policing affect long-term outcomes of teenage residents, including educational attainment, arrests and incarceration, and employment and earnings. He will leverage two policy reforms that fundamentally altered teenagers’ exposure to neighborhood policing practices. The first is a reform of the New York City Police Department, which, due to a federal lawsuit, reduced patrol officers’ ability to conduct pedestrian stops.

Jane Waldfogel

Columbia University

Visiting Researcher

Jane Waldfogel will work on a paper building upon her RSF book Child Benefits: A Smart Investment for America’s Future. Child Benefits looks at the impact of universal child benefits on family expenditures, fertility, parental employment, child poverty, and long-term health and wellbeing and makes a compelling case for adopting a universal child benefit in the U.S. Waldfogel will expand upon this research by examining public attitudes on child benefits.