Harvard Kennedy School

We identify employees at seven companies whose 401(k) investment choices are dominated because they are contributing less than the employer matching contribution threshold despite being vested in their match and being able to make penalty-free 401(k) withdrawals for any reason because they are older than 59½. At the average firm, 36% of match-eligible employees over age 59½ forgo arbitrage profits that average 1.6% of their annual pay, or $507. A survey educating employees about the free lunch they are forgoing raised contribution rates by a statistically insignificant 0.67% of income among those completing the survey.

In June of 2019, the Harvard Kennedy School hosted digital service teams from around the world for our annual State of Digital Transformation convening. Over two days, practitioners and academics shared stories of success, discussed challenges, and debated strategy around the opportunities and risks digital technologies present to governments.

In June 2020, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the digital transfor- mation consultancy Public Digital hosted digital service groups from around the world for their annual Digital Services Convening. The goal of the convening is to accelerate effective and equitable digital trans- formation in government by creating a space for digital service groups to share best practices and lessons. Now in its third year, the convening has become a place for honest reflection about the challenges facing digital service groups regarding what is and is not working in the field. Normally, teams gather in person on Harvard’s campus. This year, because of the COVID-19 pandem- ic, we gathered virtually. This online forum allowed us to convene over 100 attendees from more than 40 different digital service groups for three days of discussion. Each day had a theme. Day one focused on the “now,” examining digital teams’ responses to the pandemic. Day two focused on “later,” and highlighted long-term opportunities for digital teams. The final day was about what’s “next,” focusing on priorities and opportunities for the next six to 12 months. Teams that participated in the summit use different approaches and methodologies in vastly different contexts. Some of those—such as Estonia and Bangladesh—are building on a decade or more of experi- ence and are refining established, advanced practices; others—such as the state of Colorado—formally launched just recently. Some groups are embedded in the executive branch, while others are tightly focused within a single agency. A novel addition this year was digital teams that operate alongside, but outside of, governments— such as the Nordic Institute for Interoperable Solutions (NIIS) and the Bangalore-based Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP). As always, this diversity led to great learnings about the opportunities and challenges of digital ser- vices today. This report, prepared in consultation with some of the presenters, documents a few of these learnings in an effort to share some of the big picture insights raised at the convening with a broader audience. We hope you find these reflections useful and welcome continued conversation on the ideas presented here.

This year’s convening marked the fourth Digital Services Convening jointly organized by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Public Digital, a disruptive digital trans- formation consultancy. The event has been described by a Cambridge University study as one of six seminal digital government conferences across the globe. The importance of having a space where digital government practitioners can learn, share, and discuss their experiences is only growing, as more and more governments are grappling with transformation efforts and the subsequent issues that such efforts give rise to.

Many digital service teams had made significant gains during the pandemic and were awarded more authority, remit, and funding. COVID-19 had also affected governments’ risk appetites across the world, leading to more experimentation and iteration. This has not always led to successful outcomes; in some cases, it might not be appropriate to bypass processes or use a magic wand as a lever. However, this general shift has meant that the entrenched ways of working and the prevailing speed of bureaucracy were challenged. It remains an open question as to whether all the gains made during the pandemic can or should be retained.

This paper asks whether the World Bank can change the denomination of its lending without weakening its own financial position. Using monthly CPI and exchange-rate data, we construct the dollar returns the Bank would earn on loans indexed to borrowers’ domestic inflation and aggregate those returns using current IBRD and IDA portfolio weights. Country returns are volatile. Portfolio returns are much calmer because cross-country correlations are low. The diversification dividend is large enough to make the financially indifferent coupon on a CPI-indexed instrument close to, and in some cases below, current lending rates. The World Bank can reduce one of the core sources of macroeconomic instability in borrowing countries at little or no financial cost to itself.

Campaign staff, journalists, and political scientists commonly attribute the poor performances of a party's down-ballot candidates to low-quality or extreme top-of-the-ticket candidates, but empirical evidence on this conventional wisdom is scant. We estimate the effect of candidate quality and ideology in gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections on co-partisan vote shares in down-ballot U.S. House races. While naive estimates imply that top-of-the-ticket candidates influence down-ballot outcomes, after accounting for correlations in candidate quality/ideology across offices, we estimate near-zero statewide top-of-the-ticket effects on U.S. House elections. We similarly observe near-zero top-of-the-ticket effects in the further-down-ballot settings of state-legislative and county-legislative elections. Overall, voters exhibit a strong capacity to discern differences in quality and ideology across offices and incorporate this information into their vote choice throughout the time period under investigation. However, in line with other research, this link between candidate quality/ideology and election outcomes has weakened considerably in recent years.

In 2000, Sub-Saharan Africa was deemed to be too risky for many to invest in. Today, the continent has entered the investment mainstream. Africa's growth is increasingly broad-based and domestically driven. Around a third of GDP growth is generated in the natural resources sector, with the rest coming from a range of other sectors such as manufacturing, construction and services. Growing domestic consumption and a burgeoning middle class are creating a boom across the retail, technology and financial services sectors, further enabling economic diversification, job creation and growth.

As policy makers and businesses intensify their focus on encouraging more inclusive and sustainable growth across the region, a growing number of businesses are moving beyond traditional philanthropic and social investment approaches to doing their core business in ways that directly benefit both the poor and their own strategic and competitive business goals.

Redistricting reformers have proposed many solutions to the problem of partisan gerrymandering, but they all require either bipartisan consensus or the agreement of both parties on the legitimacy of a neutral third party to resolve disputes. In this paper, we propose a new method for drawing district maps, the Define-Combine Procedure, that substantially reduces partisan gerrymandering without requiring a neutral third party or bipartisan agreement. One party defines a map of 2N equal-population contiguous districts. Then the second party combines pairs of contiguous districts to create the final map of N districts. Using real-world geographic and electoral data, we employ simulations and map-drawing algorithms to show that this procedure dramatically reduces the advantage conferred to the party controlling the redistricting process and leads to less-biased maps without requiring cooperation or non-partisan actors.

The evidence is clear and compelling. Supporting women's economic empowerment is one of the best investments we can make. It improves development outcomes. It strengthens the quality of policy making. And it makes good business sense to harness the potential of women as directors, executives, employees, entrepreneurs and consumers. Yet, in most countries women remain under-represented and inadequately empowered as economic actors who have equal voices, choices and opportunities with men.

Despite growing investments in evidence-based policymaking, a significant gap remains between the production of policy-relevant research and the use of evidence to impact policy. This article argues that overcoming this production-adoption gap requires reconceptualizing evidence adoption as a series of behavioral and organizational hurdles that determine whether evidence is useful, usable, and, ultimately, used. Drawing on a large interdisciplinary literature, we develop a unified framework and highlight key gaps in our understanding of each of these critical stages for bringing evidence to scale. We conclude by outlining a research agenda for advancing our understanding why a production-adoption gap persists and knowledge of “what works” to increase evidence adoption – which, together, are essential for ensuring that the evidence-based policymaking movement meets its promise of improving societal outcomes.

During every stage of the 2020 presidential campaign, Donald Trump was the center of attention on the nightly newscasts of CBS and Fox News. The pattern had started much earlier. Our study of the 2016 presidential campaign found that Trump was the most heavily covered candidate in the national press during every month – and nearly every week - of the 2016 presidential campaign.

The media’s obsession with Trump is no mystery. No politician of recent times has so steadily supplied the controversy and novelty that journalists seek in their news stories and that audiences relish. Trump quipped that, within seconds of touching the send button on his Twitter feed, news outlets

The last quarter of 2020 produced decisions in Brussels, London, and Washington that constitute a turning point in the relationship between the major digital platform companies and democratic societies. Recognizing all the good these companies produce, the different actions share a similar conclusion: that the social costs imposed by the digital companies have become too high.

While there may be shared concerns about the unsustainable social and economic costs imposed by the dominant digital companies, the actions by the European Union and United Kingdom have reinforced how the European approaches to the problems of digital platforms are more direct and focused than have been those of the United States. This is a function of two factors. The E.U. and U.K. regulatory culture has been less in thrall to the non-interventionist orthodoxy that has dominated U.S. policy; thus, while the U.S. has effectively turned a blind eye, the Europeans have for several years been searching for effective solutions.

This paper compares how the United States and the European Community dealt with competition policy challenges by two firms operating at the frontiers of technology: Microsoft and Intel. The U.S. Microsoft case was broadly targeted but largely unsuccessful in implementing remedies once violation was found. The European case was more narrowly focused, failing in its media player unbundling remedy but fighting hard to implement its interoperability information remedy. The European case on Intel was also tightly focused, leading to the highest damages judgment in E.C. competition policy history and a mandate to avoid quantity-linked rebates. The newest U.S. case regarding Intel is only in its early stages, but if its ambitious claim for remedies is sustained, difficult monitoring problems will be faced. The paper ends with critical comments on E.C. adjudication procedures.

Social and economic mobility are at historic lows in America, while entrenched racial inequality cotinues to erect barriers. Research suggests that education is critically important to enable economic mobility, particularly for the lowest-income populations, which are most frequently served by the patch- work of community colleges across the US.

While progress in expanding access and enrollment at community colleges over the past 20 years is significant, the rate of degree completion has generally not improved. Systemic barriers, including financial, social, and academic, persist. Three-year completion rates for associate degrees are very low, and there is a significant achievement gap for racial and ethnic minorities. Eliminating barriers to success is not easy and the community colleges of the City University of New York (CUNY) have not been immune to these challenges. However, while many programs attempt to overcome these obstacles, few have demonstrated verifiable success and none more so than CUNY’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP).

This report is written on the occasion of the second annual Mobile Money Summit, held June 23-24, 2009 in Barcelona, Spain. The Summit provided an opportunity to take stock of the industry in the year since the inaugural Mobile Money Summit held in May 2008 in Cairo, Egypt. It is clear that, in this time, the industry has grown significantly in scope and sophistication. While the number of deployed mobile money initiatives more than doubled in the last year, reaching more than 120, the challenges of realizing mobile money's full potential - as a market opportunity and as a poverty alleviation tool - have also become better understood.

In this paper, we analyze the incentives of an incumbent and an entrant to migrate from an "old" technology to a "new" technology, and discuss how the terms of wholesale access affect this migration. We show that a higher access charge on the legacy network pushes the entrant firm to invest more, but has an ambiguous effect on the incumbent's investments, due to two conflicting effects: the wholesale revenue effect, and the business migration effect. If both the old and the new infrastructures are subject to ex-ante access regulation, we also find that the two access charges are positively correlated.

Does access to 4-year colleges affect degree completion for students who would otherwise attend 2-year colleges? Admission to Georgia’s 4-year public sector requires minimum SAT scores. Regression discontinuity estimates show that access to this sector increases 4-year college enrollment and college quality, largely by diverting students from 2-year colleges. Access substantially increases bachelor’s degree completion rates for these relatively low-skilled students. SAT retaking behavior suggests students value access to 4-year public colleges, though perhaps less than they should. Our results imply that absolute college quality matters more than match quality, and they suggest potential unintended consequences of free community college proposals.

On 20-21 November 2008, the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School and Oxfam American jointly hosted a consultation entitled: 'Access to Remedies for Corporate Human Rights Impacts: Improving Non-judicial Mechanisms'. The consultation was a contribution to the work on access to remedy of the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative on Business and Human Rights, Professor John Ruggie and follows two previous consultations on non-judicial grievance mechanisms in 2007. (Work on access to remedy through judicial mechanisms is the subject of separate work under the mandate.)

The forty participants at the event included individuals from a broad range of backgrounds with some expertise in the issues under discussion. They came from academic institutions, international organisations, business, NGOs, government, ADR organisations and law firms. The list of participants is attached. Discussions were conducted under the Chatham House Rule requiring that comments not be attributed to specific speakers. The hosts are endebted to Foley Hoag for providing the venue and refreshments for the event in Boston and to the UK Government for funding NGO participation.