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Williams Economics Professor to Join White House Sciences Fellow
05:15PM / Monday, June 20, 2016
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Jessica Leight, assistant professor of economics at Williams College, has been named a fellow on the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST).

The team is charged with translating findings and methods from the social and behavioral sciences into improvements in federal policies and programs.

The SBST is a small interdisciplinary team made up of fellows and associate fellows from colleges and universities, government agencies, and other research organizations from fields including psychology, policy, law, medicine, statistics, political science, and economics. The team will draw on their research experience to review current federal programs and recommend ways to make federal programs more effective.

Often the work of the SBST involves using data and research to find ways to overcome seemingly small barriers to increase engagement with federal programs. As an example, the SBST recommended a series of text messages to students about tasks necessary to successfully matriculate in colleges — important reminders intended to help reduce “summer melt” among college-admitted high school graduates in urban districts. In another project, the SBST recommended a targeted outreach letter to increase awareness of and access to a Farm Service Agency microloan program that can be especially beneficial to new and small farm operations.

Leight earned her Ph.D. in development economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on health and human capital investment, including agriculture, in countries around the world. One of her current projects, funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, evaluates a girls’ education program in India. Leight has experience working with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on projects in Kenya and Nigeria, and is looking forward to collaborating more with USAID from her post with SBST.

“The SBST’s strength is working with government agencies on a large scale, while I have more experience working with non-governmental and local organizations in developing countries on smaller interventions in health and education,” Leight says. “I hope to explore whether some of these insights may scale up.”

Leight will spend the fall semester conducting research on her ongoing projects at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. She will join the SBST for a six-month term starting in January 2017.

Leight has taught at Williams since 2013, offering courses such as Political Economy in Developing Countries and the Economic Development of China.

“I’m excited to see the differences between research in the academy and research driven by policy challenges,” Leight says. “I’m hoping to learn about how to incorporate behavioral insights into policy making and to see how policy making works from the inside.”

 

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