CPRC

Fall 2009

NAOMI EISENSTADT

CPRC's Fall 2009 Visiting Scholar, Naomi Eisenstadt CB, has been engaged in evidence-based policy making in the UK for nearly ten years. She was the first director of Sure Start, the UK Government’s program to bring together early education, childcare, health and family support to afford every child the best start in life. Eisenstadt was responsible for Sure Start as it grew from a time-limited area based initiative into a mainstream program incorporating all British policy on early years, childcare, out of school programs and parenting. More recently, she took on the post of Director of the Social Exclusion Task Force at the Cabinet Office, working on cross-government policy concerned with deep disadvantage and the complexities of working with individuals and families whose lives are characterized by multiple and inter-generational difficulties. She was designated a Companion of the Bath, a Crown Honour reserved for selected civil servants and high ranking military. While at CPRC, Eisenstadt will reflect and write about evidence-based policy making, how researchers can translate their results into useful findings for policy makers, and also lessons for social work practice from her experience in Sure Start and the Social Exclusion Taskforce. She is particularly interested in the challenges of inter-agency working at all levels: from getting different government departments to work together, right down to service integration at the front line. 

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QIN GAO

Qin Gao, also visiting CPRC in Fall 2009, is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service. Dr. Gao’s research focuses on the structures, trends, and impacts of social welfare policies, particularly those affecting low-income families. Specifically, Dr. Gao has engaged in research in four primary areas: 1) the Chinese social benefit system in transition and its impact on poverty, inequality, and family well-being; 2) child and family policies in the US, particularly effects of the 1996 welfare reform and other related policies on the economic well-being of low-income families; 3) cross-national comparative social policy analysis; and 4) child maltreatment and child welfare among Asian Americans.

While a visitor at CPRC, Dr. Gao will be working on two projects, both in collaboration with Dr. Irv Garfinkel. The first project examines the changing roles of market income, social benefits, and private transfers in affecting poverty—especially persistent poverty—in urban China using national household data in 1988, 1995, and 2002. The second project compares the sizes, structures, and progressivity of the social benefit systems in China and Vietnam and examines their impacts on income inequality using the China Household Income Project data and the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey data. This project is supported by a grant from the Global Public Policy Network.

Dr. Gao has published in the China Quarterly, Journal of Asian Public Policy, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Review of Income and Wealth, and Social Service Review, among others. Her work has been supported by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, the Fahs-Beck Fund for Research and Experimentation, the Lois and Samuel Silberman Fund, and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research, among others.

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2008 - 2009

LIBERTAD GONZÁLEZ

The 2008-2009 CPRC Visiting Scholar, Libertad González, is an Assistant Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. Dr. González earned her Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University. In addition to her professorship at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, she is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany, and at the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration (CreAM) at University College London (UCL). She has published in the Journal of Applied Econometrics, Labour Economics, and the European Economic Review, among others.

During her time at Columbia, Dr. González will be working on several projects. Her main research interests lie in the field of labor economics, more specifically on issues related to family and migration. In the area of family economics, her research agenda involves analyzing the effects of institutions governing family dissolution, in particular, divorce, from a cross-country perspective. One of her current projects (with Tarja Viitanen; University of Sheffield) involves analyzing the long-term effects of the legalization of divorce, on children.

The analysis will exploit the variation, across European countries, in the timing of the legalization of divorce. On a related project (with Berkay Özcan; Yale University), she is interested in the effect of the increasing risk of divorce on the saving behaviour of married couples. This project will exploit the recent legalization of divorce in Ireland as the source of an exogenous increase in the risk of divorce.

Regarding the topic of migration, Dr. González is interested in the labor market effects of migration inflows; in a project with Francesc Ortega (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) she is using the data on the large migration inflows into Spain that took place during the past few years to analyze its effects on regional economies (employment, wages, industry composition, and factor intensities).

González was particularly attracted to the CPRC by its interdisciplinary focus and the close overlap of some of its research foci with her interests in Children, Youth, and Families and Immigration/Migration.

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