John Havens is a Senior Research Associate and Associate Director of the Social Welfare Research Institute at Boston College. He received his training in mathematics, economics, and physics at Yale University and his graduate training in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He began his research career as an engineer and mathematician at the Metals Research Laboratories of Olin Matheison Corporation in 1957. Subsequently he conducted research in social psychology at the Laboratory of Psychosocial Studies at Boston College; in urban transportation for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences; in applied policy and data analysis for the American Institute for Research in Cambridge; and for the past 17 years in economic, public policy, and philanthropy analysis for the Social Welfare Research Institute at Boston College.

At the Social Welfare Research Institute, Mr. Havens directed the construction and application of the Multi-Regional Policy Impact Simulation (MRPIS) model, a large-scale but very detailed computer model of the national economy, which was used to estimate the economic impacts in a wide range of public policies, including federal tax proposals, federal budgetary analyses, health care proposals, and peace dividend alternatives. He also directed a variety of economic impact analyses including the past three studies of the economic impact of the independent colleges and universities of Massachusetts on the state's economy.

From September 1992 to the present, Mr. Havens has participated in the study of philanthropy. He directed the Boston Area Diary Study (BADS) from 1995-1997, a two year diary study that gathered and analyzed information on giving, volunteering, and caring behavior for 44 participants in the Boston metropolitan area in weekly telephone interviews. He is currently involved in four studies at SWRI: Philanthropy and the Spiritual Horizons of Wealth, funded by the T. B. Murphy Charitable Trust; Identification and Association: The Spiritual Foundations of Caritas and the Empirical Dynamics of Charity, funded by the Lilly Endowment, Inc.; with Bankers Trust Private Banking on the "Bankers Trust 1998 Survey on Wealth with Responsibility"; and "Millionaires and the Millennium: New Estimates of the Forthcoming Wealth Transfer and the Prospects for a Golden Age of Philanthropy", whose recent report estimates the wealth transfer over the next half-century to be between $41 trillion and $136

For further information, go to: The Social Welfare Research Institute at Boston College