M-RCBG Senior Fellow-Led Study Group: Ranch Kimball
Monday, April 5, 2021, 4:30pm
Zoom meeting. Please register with a Harvard.edu email address if available.
Summary: This study group should be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about regulatory economics, the politics of legalizing and expanding new industries (marijuana specifically, but gambling is touched upon), local economic development, and policy development based on extensive field work.
Contents: This study group will include comparative case studies of marijuana legalization efforts in Colorado, Washington (state), and Massachusetts. The work was based on over 20 in-person interviews with Cabinet members, agency heads, and other senior officials, site tours of over 30 marijuana retailers in numerous states, and detailed examination of several specific store-siting and regulatory conflicts. The study group will also explore the gap between policy intentions and actual outcomes, and provide some insight about why one state saw outcomes that were far different that what it expected.
Ranch Kimball has a broad perspective on the intersection of company leadership, urban policies and economic development, and the connections with innovation, basic science and with the regulated government environment. His business career included long service as a partner at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) on 3 continents, then running the private equity firm Kissinger McLarty Capital Group. Later, he was Governor Mitt Romney’s Secretary of Economic Development in Massachusetts, then served as President and CEO of a Harvard research hospital, COO of a college, and was a Managing Director at the world’s largest innovation center for start-ups. He has toured and worked with over 100 innovation districts around the U.S. and internationally. As a corporate and board leader, Ranch has served on 16 boards, ranging from publicly-traded companies to universities, museums, and multiple public-entity boards. He has chaired eight of those boards. While a Senior Fellow at M-RCBG, Ranch will work on a research project, A Quantitative Approach to Creating Successful, Diverse, and Inclusive Innovation Districts in American Cities. His Faculty sponsor is Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Email: ranch_kimball@hks.harvard.edu