My Story | Building an Economy of Repair

By Amanda N. Jackson | Economics PhD Student

Across fifteen years in advocacy and corporate accountability, I saw power at work in the economy: financial institutions, policymakers, and regulators made decisions that determined which communities could recover, build wealth, and live with security. The issue was not that affected communities failed to understand or advocate for their interests. It was that decision-making power was concentrated elsewhere and their demands were too often overridden by institutions not designed to answer to them. Black households, in particular, remained central to the consequences of economic policy while being treated as peripheral to the economic story.

That experience brought me to pursue a Ph.D in Economics at Howard University. My research is organized around what I call an “economy of repair,” an economy judged not only by whether it grows, but by whether its institutions repair harm, expand security, and close the wealth gaps they have historically created and sustained.

My current work sits at the intersection of what I've branded as reparative finance and recovery allocation: the political and institutional processes that determine who is restored after an economic crisis, how that restoration reaches—or bypasses—different households, and which losses become permanent features of the wealth distribution rather than temporary setbacks. One project asks a question that has stayed with me for years: why did a national economic recovery after the Great Recession never translate into comparable wealth recovery for Black households? I trace that divergence through the policy choices that shaped who was made whole.

As a Harvard Stone Program Visiting Scholar, I am excited to deepen this work within a community that places wealth distribution, inequality, and social policy at the center of economic inquiry. My time at Harvard will include the Stone Inequality & Social Policy Seminar, featuring mentoring from Professor Trevon Logan, whose research on racial wealth gaps speaks directly to my own. I look forward to that conversation and learning from scholars across the program who take seriously the role of policy design in determining who ends up on which side of wealth distribution.

This opportunity is part of a longer journey toward becoming the kind of economist I once needed to encounter...one who brings rigorous research on inequality and wealth into conversation with the questions communities are already asking about security, recovery, and what they are owed. I hope to use my time with the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy at Harvard to sharpen the policy dimensions of my scholarship and build research that speaks as clearly to public and economic policy debates as it does to academic ones.

Website for Amanda N. Jackson: https://www.amandanjackson.me