I direct the Center for Economic Mobility at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, where we work with school districts, agencies, and community organizations in the Houston area.
A research partnership pays for itself twice. It can help an institution decide what to do next, and it can let economists ask questions they could not otherwise ask. The two essays below take those returns in turn.
The test of learning is not whether we understand the past better. It is whether the next decision is better because of it.
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On Research and Development of Social Programs
August 2026 · Written for the people who design, fund, and deliver programs
What a research partnership is for, and why doing and learning should not be treated as competing objectives. Drawn from more than a decade with Alief Independent School District, including the three years in which the project served no families.
On Research Partnerships and Economic Science
October 2026 · Written for economists
The second return. Partnerships can do more than estimate whether a program works: by generating the right experimental variation, they can make structural models easier to falsify. Drawn from the randomized evaluation of JumpStart.