Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University

Dan Carpenter

Professor of Government, Health Policy Program

• Dan Carpenter's web site

Daniel Carpenter is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1989 with distinction in Honors Government. He received his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in 1996. He taught as Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University from 1996 to 1998, and from 1998 to 2000 was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy in residence at the University of Michigan. He joined the Harvard University faculty in 2002.

Dr. Carpenter's primary interest is in the theoretical, historical and quantitative analysis of public bureaucracies and government regulation. His dissertation received the 1998 Harold D. Lasswell Award from the American Political Science Association and as a book - ""The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928"" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) - was awarded the APSA's Gladys Kammerer Prize as well as the Charles Levine Prize of the International Political Science Association.

In his brief career, Carpenter has won six different best paper or publication awards for his research. He is a two-time winner of the Herbert Kaufman Award for the Best Paper presented in the Public Administration Section of the American Political Science Association. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California, at the Brookings Institution Research, and the Santa Fe Institute. He has also been the recipient of grants from Princeton University for teaching innovations. More recently, Carpenter's work on pharmaceutical regulation has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation and an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

More recently, Professor Carpenter has commenced a large-scale theroetical, historical and empirical analysis of the regulation of pharmaceutical products by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). He is interested in the immense variance of time-to-market and FDA review times across different drugs, as well as why the FDA is more or less prone to commit errors (Vioxx, for example) with different sorts of products and at different times. His paper ""Groups, the Media and Agency Waiting Costs: The Political Ecomony of FDA Drug Approval, "" was awarded the 2001 Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the Best Paper presented at the 2000 Midwest Political Science Association, and was published in the July 2002 edition of 'American Journal of Political Science', where it received considerable media coverage (see for instance 'The Washington Post', ""What Moves Bureaucrats,"" August 4, 2002). Most recently, Professor Carpenter's article, ""Protection without Capture: Product Approval by a Politically Responsive, Learning Regulator,"" in the November 2004 issue of the 'American Political Science Review' exposes fundamental logical and technical flaws in the classic ""capture"" arguments of Nobel Laureate George Stigler and offers a more compelling alternative model of regulation and regulatory politics. Current work (joint with Michael Ting of Columbia) examines regulatory error and the interplay between R&D and regulation.

Professor Capenter has also been working on health policy research in two areas. He has authored mathematical models of ""placebo learning,"" or the influence of placebo effects on how patients and doctors evaluate the quality of medical services and pharmaceutical therapies. And with Elizabeth Armstrong (Princeton) and Marie Hojnacki (Penn State), he is working on a large empirical project on coverage of disease in the mass media and in public fora such as congressional hearings.