Continuing its longstanding investment in scholarly research, Carnegie Corporation of New York established the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program in 2015 to provide a major boost to the social sciences and humanities. Each year, the Corporation provides more than 30 of the country’s most creative thinkers with grants of up to $200,000 each to support research on challenges to democracy and international order.
Carn
egie Fellow Jens Hainmueller is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University and holds a courtesy appointment in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also the Faculty Co-Director of the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab that is focused on the evaluation of immigration and integration policy. His research interests include immigration, statistical methods, political economy, and political behavior. He has published over 30 articles, many of them in the top journals in political science, statistics, economics, and business. He has also published three open source software packages and his research has received awards from the American Political Science Association, the Society of Political Methodology, and the Midwest Political Science Association.
How has the Carnegie Fellows Program impacted your research and overall career?
Hainmueller: The Carnegie Fellowship has a major impact in that it gives me time away from teaching to focus on my research. The timing for this fellowship could not be better. Together with my research team at the Immigration Policy Lab we have developed a comprehensive research program that employs experimental and quasi-experimental methods paired with analysis of large-scale administrative datasets and surveys to quantify the social, economic, and political impacts of various refugee and immigration policies in the United States and Europe. Given the major refugee crisis, governments are faced with a fundamental challenge: How best to integrate the massive number of new refugees into the host countries’ societies and economies? Receiving countries have an historic opportunity to develop policies that facilitate the rapid integration of refugees, but despite heated ideological debates we unfortunately have distressingly little evidence on what actually works and what doesn’t. Our research program examines the effect of wait times, geographic allocations, access to labor markets, resettlement assistance, and various integration support programs. Our goal is to generate cumulative evidence to help make informed decisions about redesigning integration policies to improve the lives of the vulnerable refugee population and enhance the economic and social prosperity of the countries in which they reside.
What topics in research do you primarily focus on? How can people access your work?
Hainmueller: Apart from the refugee work our Immigration Policy Lab has launched numerous similar research partnerships with governments, communities, immigrant service providers, and funders to test the effectiveness of policies that impact many different types of immigrants, including long-term residents, refugees, immigrant children, and undocumented immigrants. Having more time is essential to propel this research effort. The best way to access our work is to go to the Immigration Policy Lab website at: www.immigrationlab.org. And we will have a working paper series on SSRN posted in the near future. The Lab is structured as a collaborative research hub, so students or researchers interested in this topic should feel free to contact us if they would like to get involved. We’re hiring more people and just opened a branch in Switzerland.
What would be one piece of advice you would give aspiring social science and humanities students?
Hainmueller: Invest in strong methods training and don’t be too strategic. Work on questions that you feel are important.
Read more here about Jens Hainmueller’s work.