pdf - Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern University

B. Orenstein
L. Roberts
New Faculty fellows
Representing the fields
of history, education
and social policy,
political science, and
economics, these four
faculty fellows will
enhance the Institute’s
interdisciplinarity.
8 New Faculty Fellows 2006
Nancy MacLean
Professor of History
and African American
Studies; PhD, U.S.
History, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, 1989
Nancy MacLean specializes in the history
of social movements and public policy.
Her most recent book, Freedom Is Not
Enough: The Opening of the American
Workplace (Harvard University Press,
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), reveals
how central the quest for better jobs was
to the black freedom movement, women’s
movement, and Mexican American
civil rights movement. She is currently
writing a book that will trace the closing
of schools in Prince Edward County, Va.,
from 1959 to 1964. This five-year struggle
generated the first push for the tuition
grants and school vouchers that later
became a conservative cause.
Andrew Roberts
Assistant Professor
of Political Science;
PhD, Political Science,
Princeton University,
2003
Michelle Reininger
Assistant Professor of
Human Development,
Social Policy, and
Learning Sciences; PhD,
Economics of Education,
Stanford University, 2006
Michelle Reininger aims to provide a
better understanding of the dynamics
behind teacher labor markets, including
preparation, recruitment, and retention.
Specifically, Reininger studies how
geography affects teachers’ occupational
decision making as well as the role
community colleges play in supplying
teachers to areas with hard-to-staff
schools. Currently, she is involved with
two longitudinal studies of teacher
preparation, one in Chicago and the other
in New York City. These projects both
address issues related to teacher supply in
large urban environments.
Éva Nagypál
Assistant Professor
of Economics; PhD,
Economics, Stanford
University, 2001
M. Pelton Courtesy of M. Reininger
Political scientist Andrew Roberts studies
comparative politics, democratization, and
public policy. He is examining the debate
in several countries over pension system
privatization, including Social Security
in the United States. In exploring the
politics behind the privatization push, he
hopes to show how a loss of public trust in
the public scheme and relative confidence
in financial markets might induce citizens
to support privatization. He also conducts
comparative studies of democracies and
recently completed a book manuscript
examining the quality of democracy in 10
countries.
Economist Éva Nagypál’s research focuses
on labor-market dynamics. She has
studied the impact of learning on the
formation and dissolution of employment
relationships and how learning relates
to employment protection policies. Her
current interest is understanding jobto-job
transitions, which encompasses
the moves of workers between
employers without an intervening spell
of unemployment, their role in the
reallocation of labor towards its more
productive uses, and their interaction
with labor-market regulation.