The IGERT program in Politics, Economics, and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley endows students with innovative skills from the social sciences for tackling issues relating key public policy problems, by integrating and thus advancing the social sciences,. The program includes twenty faculty members from economics, political science, psychology, and public policy with strong disciplinary reputations, substantial policy interests, and significant commitments to interdisciplinary and public policy research through their connections with Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy which is coordinating the program. This IGERT program is organized around graduate student education and research on three cross-cutting social science and public policy problems: (1) Encouraging the optimal level of participation in the economy, political system, public programs, and voluntary organizations, (2) Evaluating the effects, costs, and benefits of policies, and (3) Implementing legislation consistent with original legislative intent. The intellectual merit of the program consists of developing integrative interdisciplinary courses and providing trainees opportunities for new research on (1) Understanding and modeling human behavior by combining perspectives from economics, psychology, and political science, (2) Determining causal impacts using quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods from across the social sciences, and (3) Organizational design and politics employing approaches from all the social sciences. Trainee research will be designed to advance the social sciences by considering important public policy problems and by engaging in rigorous modeling and statistical testing. Trainees will be supported through specific coursework, a weekly workshop, home discipline training, and access to innovative laboratories, data centers, and data collection organizations on the Berkeley campus. Broader impacts of this project include finding ways to increase citizens' participation in all aspects of the nation's life as well as improving the basis upon which public policy is made. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.
was an interdisciplinary graduate student training program at UC Berkeley funded by the National Science Foundation. The program was housed at the Goldman School of Public Policy and draw student fellows from the Ph.d. programs of the policy school, the economics department, the political science department, and the psychology department. Our principal goal was to fuse the cutting edge methodological developments from each discipline into a supplemental set of courses that fellows were required to take. Moreover, we brought students together from disciplines that often do not interact with the hope for creating new intellectual synergies and shaping the direction of their research careers. Our training fellows took additional course work on cutting edge empirical research methods for analyzing large data sets, courses on behavioral theory that emphasized the juncture between economics and psychology, and a course on the politics of organizations and societies. In addition to these courses, the fellows met monthly with the faculty principal investigators to (at first) discuss research ideas and to ultimately present original research projects. These monthly meeting were lively, thoroughly interdisciplinary, and achieved a level of cross-discipline fertilization that is rare in modern social science. Our students conducted research projects that reflected the training and orientation of the program and that cut across multiple disciplines. Moreover, in addition to pushing the boundaries of knowledge in their fields, out students worked on projects that was of general interest and highly relevant to real and pressing policy debates. For example, several of our students produced cutting edge research applying modern econometric methods to policy problems in the field of criminal justice. For example, one of our earliest fellows assessed whether placement in higher security level prisons leads to more a antisocial and violent-oriented psychological predisposition. In addition to procuring confidential administrative data from one of the largest prison systems in the country, this students became well versed in the psycho-metric measures used to assess risk among inmates about to be released from prison and applied modern statistical methods most commonly used in empirical economics to study the issue. Another of our students produced one of the most authoritative studies of the effects of higher police staffing levels of city-level crime rates. In addition to presenting estimates of these very important relationship , this paper also broke new ground in terms of the estimation methods used to measure relationships in data that are not generated by social experiments. Another of our students had a keen interest in international human rights policy and developed a project providing one of the first empirical analyses of the Rwandan genocide. In particular, this student was interested in assessing why participation by the majority Hutu in the slaughter of members of the Tutsi tribe varied so much from village to village. This project assessed the degree to which intergroup socioeconomic inequality explains this variation. One of our policy students employed the empirical training from the program to several studies of the effect of the Women, Infants, and Children program on whether and for how long new mothers breast feed their infants. As a final example, one of our most recent IGERT fellows completed an excellent empirical study assessing the effects of prison visitation on the likelihood that inmates engage in serious rules violations while incarcerated. This study employed a larger nationally-representative survey of state prison inmates and generally found a salutary effect of visits from friends and family, although drug violation increase with such visits. We trained nearly three dozen students over the course of this program. Many have finished and have procured jobs as professors and professional researchers throughout the nation. We have placed our students at Princeton, the University of Ohio, UC Merced, Stanford University, and the Public Policy Institute of California. The program also had a lasting impact on social science training at UC Berkeley, with several of the courses still being offered. Moreover, students in the departments targeted by our program interact with another and collaborate on new projects at a level that did not exist prior to our training program.
