The Stone Center is proud to house the US Office of LIS, the renowned cross-national data center based in Luxembourg. LIS serves an international community of researchers, educators, and policy-makers interested in quantitative research.
What to know about LIS
The LIS team in Luxembourg, directed by Peter Lanjouw, acquires micro-datasets that include information on income, employment, consumption, wealth, and household demographics, from a large number of high- and middle-income countries, and harmonizes them to enable cross-national and over-time comparisons.
The LIS archive includes two primary databases, the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, which focuses on income, and the smaller Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) Database, which focuses on wealth.
In addition to data acquisition and harmonization, the Luxembourg team is responsible for documentation; technical support; user training; and core administration, as well as creating and maintaining digital tools such as Key Figures, LISSY, METIS and DART to aid researchers. Find out if you are eligible to use these tools.
The team also produces Inequality Matters, a quarterly newsletter, and hosts a LIS/LWS Working Paper Series and the annual LIS Introductory Summer Workshop. To learn more details about the history of LIS, watch this video.
What to know about the US Office of LIS
The U.S. office, overseen by Janet Gornick, serves as a satellite office of LIS. It provides support and liaison services to the team in Luxembourg, including:
- Fundraising from U.S. federal agencies, private foundations, and individual donors;
- Raising awareness of LIS among academic institutions, NGOs, and policy-makers; and
- Helping media understand and draw on the LIS data for reporting and storytelling.
Several Stone Center core faculty members, postdoctoral scholars, and students regularly conduct research using the LIS data. In addition, the Stone Center hosts the Lee Rainwater Memorial Lecture Series, launched in 2017, in honor of Lee Rainwater, the founding research director of LIS.
