Banking The World

Jonathan Morduch, professor of public policy and economics at NYU Wagner, has co-edited a new collection about the world’s vast “unbanked” population. The book,  Banking the World: Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion, examines how to realize the goal of extending banking and other financial services to the estimated 2.5 billion people, just over half the adult population globally, who lack them. It. is published by The MIT Press and can be ordered here.

Murdoch, a contributor to the volume, is the executive director and co-founder of the Financial Access Initiative, an inter-university research center housed at the Wagner school. The full gamut of essays explore such topics as the complexity of surveying people about their use of financial services; evidence of the impact of financial services on income; and the occasional negative effects of financial services on poor households, including disincentives to work and over-indebtedness. Along with Murdoch, the book’s co-editors include Robert Cull and Asli Demirglic-Kunt.

American Milestones: A Window on NYU Wagner

Happy Holidays!

Wishing you a wonderful holiday season from Dean Ellen Schall and the entire NYU Wagner Community.

NYU Wagner Partners with NYC in “Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge”

Today the City of New York manages over 11,000 payphone kiosks – but the way that New Yorkers share information is changing rapidly. In order to modernize this powerful communications infrastructure, the City is hosting Reinvent Payphones, a public design challenge that seeks to rally urban designers, planners, technologists, and policy experts to create physical and/or virtual prototypes that imagine the future of payphones. NYU Wagner and the NYU Tisch School of the Arts are partnering with the Bloomberg administration to promote the Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge to a wide range of talented and forward-thinking students and faculty in a number of local universities.

Have ideas on how New York City can reinvent payphones to create a safer, healthier, more sustainable, accessible and informed city? Submit your prototype by February 18th and you could help to shape the City’s future.

NYU Wagner Student Receives NHHF’s Health Professional Student Scholarship

Christopher Nolan, a student at NYU Wagner, has been chosen to receive the National Hispanic Health Foundation’s 2012 Health Professional Student Scholarship, and was honored at the Ninth Annual New York Hispanic Health Professional Student Scholarship Gala Dinner on Nov. 29.

Christopher is in the MPA/Health Policy & Management program at Wagner and is Vice President of Operations for the Wagner Student Association. His specialization is Health Services Management.

(Image: Dr. Elena Rios, President of the National Hispanic Health Foundation, with Christopher Nolan at the 9th annual gala)

Foreign Policy Magazine Names Prof. Beth Noveck on Its List of “Top Global Thinkers”

NYU Wagner Visiting Professor Beth Noveck is featured in the December issue of Foreign Policy magazine as one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers 2012,” and joins five others at New York University also recognized on the magazine’s list — including: Danah Boyd of Steinhardt, Chen Guangcheng of the School of Law, and, from Stern, Jonathan Haidt, Paul Romer, and Nouriel Roubini.

Beth will be a featured guest at a Foreign Policy gala today, November 29 in Washington, D.C.

Click here to read the full news story

Opening Government Video: “The Pre-Network”

Prior to getting together at 10 Downing Street on November 9 to begin coordinating a MacArthur Foundation-supported research project on the future of government transparency in the digital age, members of the Opening Government’s “Pre-Network” brainstormed their ideas in a series of recorded interviews.  Among the participants are NYU Wagner visiting professor Beth Noveck and clinical professor Shankar Prasad.

For more information, visit http://www.openinggovernment.org/

NYU Students distribute solar lanterns to those affected by Hurricane Sandy

Students in an NYU Wagner/NYU Stern undergraduate class – “Practicum and Incubator for Social Innovation” – have connected with Sun Giant Energy to distribute solar lanterns to New Yorkers still living without electric power as a result of Hurricane Sandy.

Urban Mobility in the 21st Century

Rapid population growth in cities world-wide will lead to a shift in transportation from car ownership to a networked fleet of smaller, more efficient, sustainable shared vehicles, predicts Urban Mobility in the 21st Century, a report for the NYU BMW i Project on Cities and Sustainability prepared by Mitchell L. Moss, Director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management at NYU Wagner and Hugh O’Neill, President and Founder of Appleseed.

Click here to view the report

Do Federally Assisted Households Have Access to High Performing Public Schools?

A new report from the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy and its Moelis Institute finds that households participating in one of three major federal housing programs reach lower performing schools than poor households as a whole.

The report was prepared by NYU Wagner Professor Ingrid Gould Ellen and Keren Mertens Horn, former Doctoral Fellow at the Furman Center and Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Click here to view the report