Jacob is a PhD student in Government and Social Policy at Harvard’s Department of Government and Kennedy School. He is a Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative Graduate Fellow, a James M. and Cathleen D. Stone PhD Scholar in Inequality and Wealth Concentration, and a Terence M. Considine Fellow in Law and Social Sciences. Jacob studies the distribution of political and economic power in and across American institutions. His dissertation project empirically examines local-level landownership inequality across the US, asking who owns how much, where, and to what effect. Other work examines corporate favoritism in rulemaking processes of the administrative state and the fiscal exploitation of politically disadvantaged groups through the penal state. These projects contribute to Jacob’s pursuit of the larger question: what is the role of political and economic power in explaining why some institutions advantage the few at the expense of the many while others advantage the many at the expense of the few? Jacob received a BA in Political Science, honors BS in Mathematical and Computational Sciences, and MA in Public Policy from Stanford University in 2018. In parallel with his PhD, he will begin a JD at Yale Law School in 2022-23.
Contact:
jwaggoner@g.harvard.edu