What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong? In 2007, economist Jens Ludwig moved to the South Side of Chicago to research two big questions: Why does gun violence happen, and is there anything we can do about it? Almost two decades later, the answers aren’t what he expected. This seminar (based on a forthcoming book) describes how and why everyone’s conventional wisdom about gun violence is at best incomplete, how behavioral economics gives us a better way to understand the problem, and how a sustained partnership between the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the city of Chicago have helped identify and scale new solutions.

Advocates of abundance have identified “failed public policy” as an increasingly significant barrier to growth. State and local policies that fail to effectively deliver critically important public goods and services like health, education, safety, clean air and water, and growth-oriented infrastructure are of particular concern. 

The Social Science Research Council is supporting the members of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences in leveraging the emerging research findings about the determinants of government innovation to design a set of evidence-based initiatives aimed at accelerating state and local government innovation.

The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 directed federal agencies to evaluate the efficacy of their policies and programs, enabling agencies to learn what is working and what isn’t, and to iterate towards more effective policies and programs. However, many agencies lack the capacity to execute these evaluations. 

The Social Science Research Council is supporting the members of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences in developing an initiative to accelerate innovation in the federal government by providing opportunities for agencies to partner with university-based researchers on Evidence Act evaluation projects.

We know relatively little about the efficacy of universities’ efforts to encourage commercially viable scientific and technological innovation, support the contributions of grant-funded students and early career researchers to scientific and technological innovation after they leave university campuses, and increase and broaden opportunities in critical STEM fields. 

The Social Science Research Council is supporting the members of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences in designing a set of initiatives aimed at generating evidence-based strategies to accelerate universities' contributions to scientific and technological innovation.