About the Contributors

Amy S. Bogdon is the director of housing research at the Fannie Mae Foundation. She also serves as coeditor of the Journal of Housing Research and assistant editor of Housing Policy Debate. Previously she was a senior research economist at Fannie Mae, and a research associate at the Urban Institute. Dr. Bogdon conducts research in the area of housing economics.

Claudia J. Coulton is the Lillian F. Harris Professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences and codirector of the Center on Urban Policy and Social Change. Through the Center, she works with community-based organizations and their initiatives to address poverty and related conditions in urban neighborhoods. Her program of research includes the effects of community environments on children and families; measuring community change; evaluating community initiatives; analyzing the concentration of poverty and affluence in metropolitan areas; and studying the impact of welfare reform on poor communities.

Joseph Harkness is a research statistician in the Housing Research Group of the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on housing economics, housing policy for vulnerable populations, and location theory.

Pamela M. Jones, formerly a research analyst at Mathematica Policy Research, has completed work in the areas of housing policy, welfare reform policy, health policy, and child care policy.

G. Thomas Kingsley is the former director of the Center for Public Finance and Housing at the Urban Institute, where he managed a staff of researchers addressing policy issues in housing, local community and economic development, transportation, infrastructure, and local public finance. Mr. Kingsley's current research includes testing the market of the National Neighborhood Indicators Project, a foundation-sponsored initiative to expand the development of advanced data systems for local policy analysis and community building. He has advised HUD on strategy guidelines for the Empowerment Zone and Consolidated Planning Programs, and assisted former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros in developing a series of essays on the future of American cities.

Laura Leete is an assistant professor of economics in the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Her research has focused on the distribution of wages and employment across the labor force. She is currently studying the implications of welfare reform for low-skill labor markets. She has also written on the increasing polarization in working hours, the increasing disparity in career mobility patterns, gender- and race-based wage differences, and the relationship between wage equity and worker motivation, particularly in the context of for-profit and nonprofit organizations.

James Riccio is a senior research associate at Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), a national nonprofit research institute in New York City. He specializes in the study of work-related programs and policies for welfare recipients and other disadvantaged groups. He is currently the research director for MDRC's Jobs-Plus initiative, a new seven-city research demonstration project attempting to achieve large increases in employment and earnings and improvements in the quality of life among residents in public housing develpoments. He recently directed a long-term evaluation of California's GAIN program, the nation's largest welfare-to-work program of its type, and has studied welfare reform in Britain as a recipient of an Atlantic Fellowship in Public Policy.

Peter A. Tatian is a research associate at the Urban Institute's Public Finance and Housing Center. He is the author of the latest version of the Institute's Housing Needs Assessment Model, has participated in the national evaluation of Native American housing programs, and contributed to the Institute's USAID-sponsored technical assistance program in Eastern Europe.

Craig Thornton is a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, specializing in evaluation design and disability policy. His evaluations have examined a wide range of social policy topics, including supported housing, employment and training, welfare reform, offender rehabilitation, long-term care, and health care financing. A major focus of his work has been the development and implementation of social experiments using random assignment. He has also focused on using benefit-cost analysis as a tool for synthesizing research results to be used in policy decisionmaking.

Robert G. Wood is a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, specializing in welfare and education policy. During his tenure at Mathematica, as well as at his previous position at Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, Dr. Wood has worked on several large policy evaluations designed to measure program impacts, using both experimental and nonexperimental techniques. His most recent work has focused on the job retention of welfare recipients and teenage parenthood.

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