PROFESSOR DAVID MOSS

Photo by Evgenia Eliseeva

As a graduate student in history and economics at Yale, John G. McLean Professor David Moss struck up a friendship with the late Nobel laureate James Tobin that changed his perspective. Again and again, Professor Tobin would remind him that rather than simply aim to fill gaps in the academic literature, social scientists should focus their research on larger public problems. "That resonated with me," says Moss, who in 2005 founded the Tobin Project in collaboration with Poorvu Family Professor of Management Practice Arthur Segel. An independent, nonprofit organization, the Tobin Project brings together scholars and policymakers to tackle real-world challenges. Moss spoke to the Bulletin shortly after the organization received a $750,000 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

Where does the Tobin Project focus its research?

We concentrate on strategic research questions in four main areas: government and markets, institutions of democracy, economic inequality, and national security.

Does the organization contribute to policymaking?

Our primary goal is to support scholars in focusing on major, real-world problems over the long term. The resulting research creates a deeper understanding of the issue at hand and, when we're successful, can impact both scholars' and policymakers' approaches to the problem. In some cases, terrific policy proposals emerge as well, but that's more a by-product of our work than the main objective. For example, Tobin-seeded research contributed to key elements of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, in addition to shaping the Obama administration's approach to evaluating the efficacy of regulations across agencies.

How does the collaboration process work?

First, we come up with questions that meet five criteria: Will pursuit of the question facilitate research that would not have otherwise been done? Does it focus on an important problem in the world? Can it attract the interest of key scholars? Will it serve as a catalyst for research by other scholars? And could the answers potentially make a transformative contribution to public debate?

Once we have a question that fits the bill, we pose it to scholars in our community, which includes over 350 professors, graduate students, and professional researchers from 17 different disciplines and more than 80 institutions. At every stage they work with a network of policymakers and practitioners, who contribute feedback on the relevance and potential impact of the research. Developing this approach has been a process of looking at how to translate phenomenal intellectual excitement and energy into actual movement in the research and ultimately a deeper understanding of important real-world problems. At this point, we do have a model that is moving us in the right direction. The question going forward is whether we can scale the impact of the model. We're planning to use some of the MacArthur Award funds to help us figure that out.

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