Public event

Christopher Calabrese, Vice President for Policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology will discuss the pros and cons of facial recognition technology, how it is changing many aspects of our lives, and how policymakers should address it.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson will deliver opening remarks for a panel discussion on "Communities of Interest" and the important role they will play in Michigan's new redistricting process beginning in 2020.

Armchair conversation between Secretary Donald Winter and Mike Barger, Executive Director, Office of Strategy and Academic Innovation at the Ross School of Business.

This fall, our Symposium team is hosting “Dispossessing Detroit: How the Law Takes Property” on November 9 and 10, 2019.

Greg Landsman, a Cincinnati city council member, will give a talk titled "Beyond School: Where to Focus Collective Action to Support Children in Poverty" as part of the 2019 Real-World Perspectives on Poverty Solutions speaker series.

The Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship and Downpayment (SEED) initiative began in 2003 to test asset-building accounts for children and youth with the goal of providing strategic and practical lessons in how to create an inclusive CSA system. At the SEED impact assessment site in Michigan (MI-SEED), 500 Head Start families were offered Michigan 529 Educational Savings plans. The accounts were opened with an initial contribution of $800 from program funding and a possible $200 match from the State of Michigan. Any subsequent savings by the family were matched 1:1 up to $1200. Another set of similar Head Start families made up a comparison group that was not offered accounts. Most of the participating pre-school children are now old enough to graduate from high school and actually use the accounts to fund post-secondary education. This presentation will offer preliminary longitudinal data on accounts, standardized test scores, and other educational outcomes over time. 

Interested in a career in Finance or Technology? Learn More From Professor Adrienne Harris!

Join us for an information session about the Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) graduate certificate!

The Local Voices Network is a community-driven listening network which aims to improve our understanding of one another through communication.  Kathy Cramer, one of the groups' founders, will talk about how it works and what 's coming out of  the chapters in Wisconsin, New York, Massachusetts, and Alabama.  

This event has been canceled.

The University of Michigan's Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project is hosting its first Small Business Showcase. Meet some of the 30 Detroit small business owners who are working with University of Michigan marketing, communications, law, design, and accounting students this fall -- and a few of our superstar alumni businesses, too!  

Leading scholars from Africa and Latin America will share insights about macro-level commonalities in transitional justice processes across diverse societies.

Please join the Law School's Environmental Law and Policy Program as we host our first lecture of the 2019-2020 academic year- "A Conversation with Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick."This extraordinarily timely event will include discussion of regional greenhouse gas initiatives, the clean energy revolution, corporate sustainability efforts, and the impact of the 2020 election on climate change and environmental protection efforts.  

  Sixty years ago, Congress established a federal pre-approval regime for bank mergers to protect consumers from then-unprecedented consolidation in the banking sector. This process worked well for several decades, but it has since atrophied, producing numerous “too big to fail” banks. Professor Kress's research contends that regulators’ current approach to evaluating bank merger proposals is poorly suited for modern financial markets. Policymakers and scholars have traditionally focused on a single issue: whether a bank merger would reduce competition. Over the past two decades, however, changes in bank regulation and market structure—including the repeal of interstate banking restrictions and the emergence of nonbank financial service providers—have rendered bank antitrust analysis largely obsolete. As a result, regulators have rubber stamped recent bank mergers, despite evidence that such deals could harm consumers and destabilize financial markets.  Professor Kress's research asserts that contemporary bank merger analysis should instead emphasize statutory factors that regulators have long neglected: whether a proposed merger would increase systemic risks, enhance the public welfare, and strengthen the relevant institutions. Professor Kress's research urges regulators to modernize their approach, and it proposes a novel framework to ensure that bank merger oversight safeguards the financial system. The proposals contained herein have far-reaching implications not only for bank regulation but also for the ongoing debate over merger policy in technology, agriculture, and other industries.

ComCap19, presented by the National Coalition for Community Capital (NC3), is a multi-day gathering that offers a unique educational and networking opportunity for all those working toward equitable, resilient, and engaged communities. 

Join the students of PUBPOL 750: Renewable Energy Policy at the State & Local Level for a Student Symposium on State & Local Renewable Energy Policy.  Students will share their research on the web of state and local policies facilitating and hindering renewable energy deployment in California, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, and Wyoming.

Over the past five years, a growing number of Xinjiang Uighurs have been sent to re-education camps by the Chinese government, most without trials or release dates.  Estimates have reached as high as one million detainees.   The Chinese government has framed these camps as schools that attack terrorist beliefs and give Uighurs the work and life skills necessary to thrive in a modern economy.  It has received very little pressure or public condemnation from its Central Asian neighbors, from Muslim countries, or from its trading partners in the developed world.  This human rights crisis raises questions central to the role and practice of diplomacy.  What justification is there for bringing foreign diplomatic pressure to bear on issues that a country defines as central to its identity and existence?  What do we know about the success of different types of advocacy, whether through diplomatic channels, pressure from international organizations, or NGO-led protest? To what extent does the crisis in Xinjiang affect the stability of Central Asia, or the fate of separatist movements in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan?

Join the Program for Practical Policy Engagement,  Communications & Outreach, Public Engagement & Impact, and Michigan News for a Getting Stuff Done: Communications Skills Series.

Many statutes now permit bounties for whistleblowers who provide enforcement relevant information to the authorities.  The growth in such bounties has been quite rapid in recent years generating substantial scholarly, policy and practical interest.  However, much of the scholarship does not address a critical feature of corporate liability in the US – there is considerable uncertainty about both the scope and definition of wrongdoing. This talk examines the effects of this uncertainty on the desirable structure and incidence of bounty regimes.  Some key findings are that the greater this uncertainty the harder it will be to gather information about wrongdoing both within a firm and more generally because individuals will likely be reluctant to share information that might be relevant to enforcement. This has numerous effects. First, as gathering and sharing of information becomes more difficult it will become harder to deter and prevent wrongdoing, which in part depends on gathering and sharing information.  Second, weaker gathering and sharing of information within the firm will hamper the ability of employees to work together cohesively. This not only worsens firm performance (which has its own costs), but also is likely to increase wrongdoing because poor firm performance is a key predicator of corporate wrongdoing. The analysis thus counsels caution in extending whistleblower bounties to areas where the underlying law is uncertain, provides insights on how one might design a bounty system in light of this uncertainty (e.g., differentiating between internal and external whistleblowers, varying bounties by firm size), and lays out certain steps that might be taken to ameliorate some of the identified effects of uncertainty.

The Office of Research and the Ford School's Program in Practical Policy Engagement would like to invite you to a presentation on, "The Federal Budget and Policy Process: an NSF perspective."

Rich Cordray, founding director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Rohit Chopra, Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission will keynote.