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 concentration in  landownership 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 2021-22.

Project: Land of the Free or Land of the Few? Local Concentration in US Landownership