The Tobin Project

About the Tobin Project

The Tobin Project is a nonprofit, non-partisan research organization motivated by the belief that innovative scholarship on major, real-world problems can make a profound difference, improving society and strengthening the country. The mission of the Tobin Project is to mobilize, motivate, and support a community of scholars across the social sciences and allied fields who seek to deepen our understanding of significant challenges facing the nation. Now in its seventh year, the Tobin Project has built an interdisciplinary network of over 350 leading scholars across 80 institutions, from Nobel Laureates to promising graduate students, who are together working to generate pioneering research on critical problems of the 21^st century. By involving both policymakers and practitioners throughout the research process, the Tobin Project aims to identify and pursue questions with the greatest potential to benefit society over the long term. Tobin has successfully built and proven a model for engaging a network of top scholars and policymakers on vital questions; advancing new interdisciplinary research agendas; and disseminating compelling ideas that have the potential to reshape academic research, public policy formation, and overall public discourse. Tobin has organized a series of highly productive conferences, seminars, and workshops; seeded groundbreaking new research; produced several books and numerous papers across our program areas; and influenced key aspects of policy debate. The Tobin Project is currently focused on four core research areas:

• Government & Markets: What are the conditions that distinguish success from failure in the governance and regulation of the economy?

• Institutions of Democracy: What factors and institutions—of government, business, civil society, and beyond—are most central to the functioning of American democracy?

• Economic Inequality: What are the consequences of the dramatic and continuing rise of income inequality in the United States for the economy, society, and democracy?

• National Security: How can the U.S. sustainably advance its national security interests given fiscal constraints and shifts in the global distribution of power?