Justine S. Hastings

Justine S. Hastings is a Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University, a Faculty Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Founding Director of Research Improving People’s Lives, a nonprofit research institute using data and science to impact policy and improve lives. Her research expertise spans in Industrial Organization and Public Economics to address important economic and policy questions. She has conducted academic research on topics such as market structure and competition, environment and energy regulation, advertising and consumer protection, consumer financial markets, health care, social safety-net programs, and markets for higher education. Her research employs diverse empirical techniques including field experiments, survey analysis, machine learning, predictive analytics, analysis of large administrative datasets, and structural demand and supply estimation. Her research was cited in the 2017 Nobel Prize scientific background materials implications, and has been used to shape public policy improvements around the world.

Professor Hastings has served as an expert advisor on the Academic Research Council to the United States Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She has served as the Managing Editor for the International Journal on Industrial Organization, an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Economic Literature, and a Co-Editor for the Journal of Public Economics. She is a scholar visiting Amazon during the current academic year.

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Policymakers at the state and local levels tackle some of the toughest problems facing society. To make measurable progress in solving these problems, public policy needs to be effective, efficient, and evidence based. Justine Hastings of Brown University draws on her experiences founding Research Improving People’s Lives (RIPL), a nonprofit research–policy partnership in Rhode Island that aims to make state policy more fact based and more effective through the creation of an integrated database of state administrative data and derived tables. She provides best practices for creating the database and using it effectively to derive policy insights.

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Fact-Based Policy: How Do State and Local Governments Accomplish It?