CCNY economist joins White House “nudge team”

Associate Professor of Economics and Business Matthew Nagler joins a select group of academics from institutions around the country as a member of the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team.

Informally known as the “nudge team,” the SBST was created by executive order in 2015 to apply findings from the social and behavioral sciences to improve federal policies and programs, particularly by leveraging unobtrusive incentives, or “nudges.”

A behavioral economist, Nagler is a proponent of “nudges,” a term coined in a 2008 book by University of Chicago academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

Striving to understand what influences people’s decisions has been a theme of his work in recent years. This theme pervades Nagler’s published papers on issues as diverse as choice in the Australian federal election and using social capital to promote traffic safety. These papers seek to understand and identify interventions that can be used by public policy makers.

When he returns to CCNY’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership in September, Nagler will bring back a host of experiences that will inform his teaching and research.

“One of the most exciting things will be to tell my students how economics gets applied in real-life policy making,” he said. “Not based on some theory, but based on actually having done it.”

About The City College of New York

Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided low-cost, high-quality education for New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. More than 15,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in the College of Liberal Arts and Science; Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture; School of Education; Grove School of Engineering; Sophie Davis Biomedical Education/CUNY School of Medicine; and the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. U.S. News, Princeton Review and Forbes all rank City College among the best colleges and universities in the United States.