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Tobin Project Awarded MacArthur Foundation Grant

Ed Balleisen, a history professor and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute of Ethics, helped form project

Duke history professor and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics Ed Balleisen has for the last eight years been formative in the Tobin Project, a non-profit research organization which was recently awarded a $750,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation to develop new research initiatives.

The Tobin Project has created several networks of leading social scientists who share interests around big public policy questions, such as regulatory policy, national security and social inequality. The project seeks to connect interdisciplinary collaborators from both the academic and policy-making communities, and has served as a model for the current program in Rethinking Regulation at the Kenan Institute.

Balleisen was invited to help get Tobin off the ground in 2005. Since that time, he has helped forge a strategic direction for the organization. From 2007-2009, he and David Moss of the Harvard Business School spearheaded a major research project on regulatory governance, culminating in the 2009 publication "Government and Markets: Toward a New Theory of Regulation."

In the fall of 2010 Balleisen initiated the Rethinking Regulation project at Kenan. This endeavor unites an interdisciplinary group of scholars from area universities working on issues related to regulation. It has also attracted participation by leading officials, including Sally Katzen, the former director of the national Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs who will become a practitioner-in-residence at Kenan next fall.

On his experience with the Tobin organization, Balleisen notes that it "has had a big impact on my own intellectual engagement -- the sorts of questions that I ask, the audiences that I try to reach, the communities that I try to foster."

Balleisen is currently involved in a Rethinking Regulation project on recalibrating risk, uniting scholars from around the world to assess regulatory reaction to crises such as nuclear events, oil spills and economic recessions.