Greg Duncan

Edwina S. Tarry Professor, School of Education and Social Policy
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research,
Northwestern University
PhD, Economics, University of Michigan
greg-duncan@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Additional biographical information

Downloadable Research Papers

Greg Duncan has published extensively on issues of income distribution, child poverty and welfare dependence. He is co-author with Aletha Huston and Tom Weisner of Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children (2007) and co-editor with Lindsay Chase Lansdale of For Better and For Worse: Welfare Reform and the Well-Being of Children and Families (2001). With Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, he co-edited two books on neighborhood poverty and child development: Consequences of Growing up Poor (Russell Sage, 1997) and the two-volume Neighborhood Poverty (Russell Sage, 1997), which was also co-edited with Lawrence Aber. He continues to study neighborhood effects on the development of children and adolescents and other issues involving welfare reform, income distribution, and its consequences for children and adults. He joined the Northwestern faculty in 1995. He had been principal investigator of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics project at Michigan for the previous 13 years, professor of economics, and Distinguished Research Scientist at Michigan's Survey Research Center.

Duncan is a member of the interdisciplinary MacArthur Network on the Family and the Economy. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and was elected president of the Population Association of America for 2007-08; he is currently its vice president. He was elected president of the Society for Research in Child Development.

Current Projects

Long-Term Outcomes for Gautreaux Families. This study analyzes housing, welfare receipt and labor market outcomes of low-income mothers and their children, who have relocated from Chicago public housing under the Gautreaux Program. The research focuses on the effects of the characteristics of the original destination neighborhoods on these outcomes. Duncan and co-investigator James Rosenbaum add to previously collected survey results with new state administrative data on outcomes and a more complete characterization of the initial neighborhood to which the families relocated.

Evaluation of the New Hope Project. In collaboration with the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), Duncan and two IPR graduate fellows are continuing to evaluate the effects on family functioning and child well-being of an innovative, random-assignment anti-poverty program in two Milwaukee neighborhoods. The New Hope Project, which began in 1994, guaranteed poor families access to a job, a wage supplement, and subsidies for health insurance and child care. The researchers have analyzed quantitative data from surveys and administrative records and collected and analyzed ethnographic data from 45 randomly selected program and control families in the sample. Analyses of survey data collected eight years after random assignment is currently underway. Duncan and co-authors Aletha Huston and Tom Weisner will publish a book about New Hope in early 2007.

Selected Publications

Click here for downloadable papers

Books

Duncan, Greg, with Aletha Huston and Tom Weisner. Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children. Russell Sage (2007).

Committee on Evaluation of Children’s Health, National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, Greg Duncan and Ruth Stein, committee co-chairs. Children’s Health, the Nation’s Wealth: Assessing and Improving Child Health. National Academy Press (2004).

Duncan, Greg, with Bruce Weber and Leslie Whitener, eds. Rural Dimensions of Welfare Reform. W. E. Upjohn Institute (2002).

Duncan, Greg, with Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, eds. For Better and For Worse: Welfare Reform and the Well-Being of Children and Families. Russell Sage (2001).

Duncan, Greg, with Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and J. Lawrence Aber, eds. Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for Children, volumes I and II. Russell Sage (1997).

Duncan, Greg, with Jeanne Brooks-Gunn. The Consequences of Growing Up Poor. Russell Sage (1997).

Duncan, Greg, with Graham Kalton, Daniel Kasprzyk and M. P. Singh, eds. Panel Surveys. John Wiley (1989).

Selected Chapters and Articles

Duncan, G., with J. Boisjoly, M. Kremer, D. M. Levy, and J. Eccles. Empathy or antipathy? The impact of diversity. Forthcoming in American Economic Review.

Duncan, G., with K. Magnuson. The role of family socioeconomic resources in black and white test score gaps among young children. Forthcoming in Developmental Review.

Duncan, G., with P. Morris and E. Clark-Kauffman. Child well-being in an era of welfare reform: The sensitivity of transition in development to policy change. Forthcoming in Developmental Psychology.

Duncan, G., with A. Huston, V. McLoyd, T. Weisner, D. Crosby, M. Ripke, and C. Eldred. Impacts on children of a policy to promote employment and reduce poverty: New Hope after five years. Forthcoming in Developmental Psychology.

Duncan, G., with M. Keels, S. DeLuca, R. Mendenhall, and J. Rosenbaum. 2005. Fifteen years later: Can residential mobility programs provide a long-term escape from neighborhood segregation, crime and poverty? Demography 42(1): 51-73.

Duncan, G., with K. Magnuson and J. Ludwig. 2004. The endogeneity problem in developmental studies. Research in Human Development 1(1&2): 59-80.

Duncan, G., with the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. 2003. Modeling the impacts of child-care quality on children’s preschool cognitive development. Child Development 74(5): 1454-75.

Duncan, G., with K. Mullan Harris, and J. Boisjoly. 2001. Sibling, peer, neighbor and schoolmate correlations as indicators of the importance of context for adolescent development. Demography 38(3): 437-47.