This publication summarizes the research produced by the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School during calendar year 2008. It also summarizes the activities and publications of the School’s Centers and describes new teaching cases, doctoral dissertations, and working papers.

The mission of the Harvard Kennedy School is to “Train exceptional public leaders and to generate the ideas that provide solutions to our most challenging public problems.” Our message to our faculty, students and staff, and to everyone who visits our website is “Ask what you can do.” The School does its part by conducting research that can illuminate important real-world issues and discover innovative ways to address them. The conduct and dissemination of rigorous scholarship is thus an integral part of the School’s mission.

The research featured in this report exemplifies the HKS commitment to multidisciplinary research directed at the most important public problems. Our faculty in this last calendar year has produced research related to the vitally current topics of tax policy and trade; see, for example, the books and working papers produced by Jeff Frankel, Robert Lawrence, and Monica Singhal. Our international development scholars have tackled the issues of governance, constraints on growth, religion, and participation, as illustrated by the working papers of Matt Andrews, Ricardo Hausmann, Asim Khwaja, Rohini Pande, and Dani Rodrik. Among our faculty books are several that are relevant to both public leadership and the structuring of the public’s work; they are authored by Jack Donahue, Joe Nye, and Barbara Kellerman. You will also find in this report references to books and papers on housing, the Iraq war, international organization, crisis management, and many other topics.

Many faculty members whose research is catalogued in this report worked on the transition teams for the Obama administration and several of them are now on public service leave to serve in the administration. They illustrate by their work and engagement that research is indeed relevant to solving public problems, and that committed scholars can be both intellectually rigorous and practical.

This volume is the third Research Report produced during my tenure as Academic Dean. It is an honor for me to carry on this fine tradition, and to introduce the interesting and important work of our faculty to a broader audience.

Mary Jo Bane
Academic Dean
Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management