In this virtual convening of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences, Arthur Lupia, executive director of the Bold Challenges Initiative at the University of Michigan, and Jeremy Weinstein, faculty director of Stanford Impact Labs, talked about their work to support faculty and graduate students pursuing ambitious applied and socially relevant research, in partnership with public, private, and nonprofit organizations.

Public and private funding organizations, state legislatures, and donors increasingly expect universities to produce socially impactful and policy-relevant research. However, publication and promotion incentives may undermine efforts to mobilize the social and behavioral science research community to pursue policy-relevant research. This series of virtual convenings is an opportunity for member institutions of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences (CUF) to share what works–and what doesn’t–to mobilize social and behavioral science that is both policy-relevant and scientifically rigorous. These virtual convenings are intended to be an opportunity for cross-institutional learning and networking across CUF member institutions, and we …

Solutions to many of today’s key development challenges hinge not on creating new technologies and solutions, but in understanding why the poor do not adopt seemingly beneficial technologies that already exist. Throughout the developing world, there are countless examples of technologies that appear to be welfare enhancing but are adopted by the poor at very low rates. Examples span health, finance, and agriculture sectors, and include cleaner cook-stoves, anti-malarial bednets, toilets, fertilizer, weather insurance, and improved seed varieties. To make progress on these problems, we need to understand the sources of behavioral or structural barriers to new technology adoption, in order to devise policies and marketing strategies to address those barriers. This talk will highlight economic analysis and randomized-controlled-trial based field experimental methods applied in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to make progress on these questions.