Richard Alba
Richard Alba is distinguished professor of sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He was educated at Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in 1974. Alba’s teaching and research interests include race, ethnicity and immigration and increasingly have taken a comparative focus on North America and Western Europe. He has conducted research in France and Germany with support of the National Science Foundation, Fulbright grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and the Russell Sage Foundation. His research has also been advanced by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. His books include Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (Yale University Press, 1990); Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (Prentice Hall, 1985); the award-winning Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Harvard University Press, 2003), co-written with Victor Nee; The Children of Immigrants at School: A Comparative Look at Integration in the United States and Western Europe (NYU Press, 2013), co-edited with Jennifer Holdaway. His next book, co-authored with Nancy Foner, will be Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe, to be published in 2015 by Princeton University Press. Alba has been elected vice president of the American Sociological Association and president of the Eastern Sociological Society. He has delivered the Nathan Huggins Lectures at Harvard University, which led to the book, Blurring the Color Line: The New Chance for a More Integrated America (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Louis Chauvel
Louis Chauvel is a French sociologist, professor at the University of Luxembourg and winner of the Chair PEARL “Programme Excellence for Award of Research in Luxembourg” on social welfare, income and wealth and social change in a comparative perspective. Honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) and former professor at Sciences Po Paris (2005-2012), he earned his Ph.D. in U Lille in 1997 and his habilitation at Science Po Paris in 2003. In 2000 he was an invited fellow at Berkeley and was an invited professor at Columbia University in 2011-2012. He is specialized in social inequalities and public policies, social change, social stratification and mobility, advanced methodology of social sciences and population studies, with a special focus on comparative birth cohort dynamics. He has been member of the executive committee of International Sociological Association (ISA) since 2006 (2006-10 & 2010-14), former general secretary of the European Sociological Association (ESA 2005-7), and former treasurer of the French Sociological Association (AFS) (2002-6). He is a member of the ISA research committee on social stratification (RC28) and on classes (RC47) and has been responsible chair of the research network on classes, inequalities, fragmentations of the AFS .
Andrew Clark
Andrew Clark holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He is currently a CNRS research professor at the Paris School of Economics (PSE), and previously held posts at Dartmouth, Essex, CEPREMAP, DELTA, the OECD and the University of Orléans. His work has largely focused on the interface between psychology, sociology and economics; in particular, using job and life satisfaction scores, and other psychological indices, as proxy measures of utility. One particular research question has been that of relative utility or comparisons (to others like you, to others in the same household, and to yourself in the past), finding evidence of such comparisons with respect to both income and unemployment. Recent work has looked at habituation to unemployment, poverty, marriage, divorce and children using long-run panel data. In addition to his Paris position, he holds research associate positions at the Flinders University, IZA (Bonn), Kingston University and the London School of Economics. He is on the editorial boards of ten journals, and has acted as referee for over 175 different journals across the social sciences.
Jordan Conwell
Jordan A. Conwell is an assistant professor in the Departments of Sociology and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology, the Institute for Research on Poverty, the Interdisciplinary Training Program in the Education Sciences, and the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs. His research focuses on racial, social class, and gender inequalities in human development, particularly as these relate to education. One current project in this line of research investigates racial achievement gaps between Black and White children whose parents have similarly low, middle, or high incomes. It draws on multiple national datasets to track these gaps’ development across birth cohorts from the mid-twentieth century to the present as well as within a single cohort of children as they age. His work has been funded by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation and has appeared in journals including The Journal of Negro Education and Sociology of Education. He completed a Ph.D. in Sociology at Northwestern University in 2017.
Miles Corak
Miles Corak is Professor of Economics at The Graduate Center. His research focuses on social mobility, inequality, and child rights. His findings documenting that higher inequality is associated with lower economic opportunity have been widely cited, and used by policy-makers worldwide. Top print and electronic media, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and the BBC have all used Professor Corak’s research on “The Great Gatsby Curve”, as has The White House. Prior to joining The Graduate Center, Corak was professor of economics at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa Canada, and for many years a member of the senior management at Statistics Canada, Canada’s national statistical agency. He has been a visiting researcher with the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy; the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the University of London; the Office of Population Research at Princeton University; the Russell Sage Foundation; and was a visiting professor with the Department of Economics at Harvard University. During 2017, he served as the-economist-in-residence with the Canadian Federal government, advising on social policy reform and the country’s poverty reduction strategy.
Conchita D’Ambrosio
Conchita D’Ambrosio is professor of economics at the University of Luxembourg. She is an economist, with a Ph.D. from New York University (2000). Her research interests have revolved around the study of individual and social well-being and the proposal of various measures that are able to capture its different aspects. Two main points were stressed. Individual well-being depends on comparisons with a reference situation; individual well-being depends both on one’s own life course and on the histories of others. Towards this aim, she has proposed a number of different indices, which have been axiomatically characterized. She has applied these to the study of different societies and analyzed their empirical links with subjective well-being, via their correlations with self-reported levels of satisfaction with income and life overall. She has published in Economica, Economics Letters, International Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Social Choice and Welfare, the Review of Income and Wealth among other academic journals. She has been member of the editorial board of the Review of Income and Wealth since 2001 and managing editor of the same journal since 2007. She joined the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Inequality in 2013.
Michael F. Förster
Michael Förster is a senior policy analyst and economist at the OECD Jobs and Income Division, Paris. He has been working in different departments at the OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs since more than 20 years and, particularly, has been involved in and leading successive OECD work on inequality, income distribution and poverty. He is co-author of Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries (OECD, 2008) and lead author of the follow-up studies, Divided we Stand: Why Inequality keeps rising (OECD, 2011) and In It Together – Why Less Inequality Benefits All (OECD, 2015). Those reports analysed the causes of inequality; the impact of the global crisis and subsequent consolidation policies on inequalities; the distributive effects of employment structure changes; and the impact of increasing inequality on growth. The 2018 OECD flagship report A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility provided new evidence on social mobility in the context of increased inequalities of incomes and opportunities and discusses policy options. The most recent report, Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class highlights the three key challenges for OECD middle-income households, those of unfairness; expensiveness of living costs; and uncertainty of economic prospects. Förster is currently directing several follow-up projects, including work on drivers of wealth concentration. In the past, he has been working with international research institutes, such as the Luxembourg Income Study (1994-1996) and the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research, Vienna (2000-2004). He studied economics at the Universities of Vienna and Saarbrücken and holds a Ph.D. from University of Liège. Förster is a member of the Council of the French Observatory of Poverty and Social Exclusion (ONPES). He is author of various journal articles, research papers and book contributions, recently to the Elsevier Handbook of Income Distribution.
Janet Gornick
Janet Gornick attended Harvard University, where she was awarded a B.A. (psychology and social relations 1980), an M.P.A. (Kennedy School 1987), and a Ph.D. (political economy and government 1994). She is currently professor of political science and sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. From September 2006 to August 2016, she served as director of LIS (formerly, the Luxembourg Income Study), a cross‐national data archive and research center located in Luxembourg, with a satellite office at The Graduate Center. As of September 1, 2016, she serves as director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Socio‐Economic Inequality, and as director of the US Office of LIS. Most of her research is comparative and concerns social welfare policies and their impact on gender disparities in the labor market and income inequality. She has published articles on gender inequality, employment, and social policy in several journals. She is co-author or co-editor of three books: Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (Russell Sage Foundation 2003), Gender Equality: Transforming Family Divisions of Labor (Verso Press 2009), and Income Inequality: Economic Disparities and the Middle Class in Affluent Countries (Stanford University Press 2013). Her research has been supported by many sponsors, including the Russell Sage Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), the Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS), the Social Security Administration (SSA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Governors’ Association (NGA), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank.
Darrick Hamilton
Darrick Hamilton is the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. In addition, he holds a primary faculty appointment in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, with courtesy appointments in the departments of economics and sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a pioneer and internationally recognized scholar in the field of stratification economics, which fuses social science methods to examine the causes, consequences and remedies of racial, gender, ethnic, tribal, nativity, etc. inequality in education, economic and health outcomes. This work involves crafting and implementing innovative routes and policies that break down social hierarchy, empower people, and move society towards greater equity, inclusion, and civic participation. He was born and raised in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, NY, and now resides in the Short North section of Columbus, OH. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina. He is frequently cited in the media, consults with various public official and serves as an advisor to/fellow with several non-profit and think tank organizations.
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is an assistant professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, where he studies American political economy, with a focus on the politics of business, labor, wealthy donors, and policy. His most recent book, State Capture, examines how networks of conservative activists, donors, and businesses built organizations to successfully reshape public policy across the states and why progressives failed in similar efforts. His previous book, Politics at Work, examines how employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and policy. His current research focuses on the politics of labor unions, with a focus on the public sector labor movement and worker preferences for new models of labor organization; interest groups, lobbying and legislative representation; the political activities of wealthy Americans; and American political economy. He received his Ph.D. in government and social policy from Harvard University and is currently a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.
Nancy Krieger
Nancy Krieger is professor of social epidemiology, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and director of the HSPH Interdisciplinary Concentration on Women, Gender, and Health. She has been a member of the School’s faculty since 1995. She is an internationally recognized social epidemiologist (Ph.D., epidemiology, UC Berkeley, 1989), with a background in biochemistry, philosophy of science, and history of public health, plus 30+ years of activism involving social justice, science, and health. In 2004, she became an ISI highly cited scientist, a group comprising “less than one-half of one percent of all publishing researchers, with her ranking reaffirmed in the 2015 update.” In 2013, she received the Wade Hampton Frost Award from the Epidemiology Section of the American Public Health Association, and in 2015, she was awarded the American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professorship.
Krieger’s work addresses three topics: (1) conceptual frameworks to understand, analyze, and improve the people’s health, including the ecosocial theory of disease distribution she first proposed in 1994 and its focus on embodiment and equity; (2) etiologic research on societal determinants of population health and health inequities; and (3) methodologic research on improving monitoring of health inequities. In April 2011, her book, Epidemiology and the People’s Health: Theory and Context, was published by Oxford University Press. This book presents the argument for why epidemiologic theory matters. Tracing the history and contours of diverse epidemiologic theories of disease distribution from ancient societies on through the development of — and debates within — contemporary epidemiology worldwide, it considers their implications for improving population health and promoting health equity. She is also editor of Embodying Inequality: Epidemiologic Perspectives (Baywood Press, 2004) and co-editor, with Glen Margo, of AIDS: The Politics of Survival (Baywood Publishers, 1994), and, with Elizabeth Fee, of Women’s Health, Politics, and Power: Essays on Sex/Gender, Medicine, and Public Health (Baywood Publishers, 1994). In 1994 she co-founded, and still chairs, the Spirit of 1848 Caucus of the American Public Health Association, which is concerned with the links between social justice and public health.
Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman is a distinguished professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, a core faculty member at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, a LIS senior scholar, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. He previously taught at MIT, Stanford, and Princeton. He is the author or co-author of many academic papers and numerous books aimed at both professional and general audiences, including Market Structure and Foreign Trade, Geography and Trade, and The Return of Depression Economics.
In recognition of his work on international trade and economic geography, Krugman received the John Bates Clark award of the American Economic Association in 1991, the Prince of Asturias award for social sciences in 2004, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008. He is best known to the general public as an op-ed columnist and blogger for The New York Times. In 2011, his blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” was ranked number one of “The 25 Best Financial Blogs” by Time Magazine. His blog is regularly read by his 3.6 million Twitter followers.
Leslie McCall
Leslie McCall is presidential professor of sociology and political science, and associate director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, at The Graduate Center, CUNY . She studies public opinion about inequality, opportunity, and related economic and policy issues; trends in actual earnings and family income inequality; and patterns of intersectional inequality. She is the author of The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution (2013) and Complex Inequality: Gender, Class, and Race in the New Economy (2001). Her research has also been published in a wide range of journals and edited volumes and supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, Demos: A Network of Ideas and Action, the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and the Advanced Research Collaborative of The Graduate Center. She was formerly Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University.
Branko Milanovic
Branko Milanovic is a visiting presidential professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY and senior scholar at the Stone Center for Socio-Economic Inequality. He obtained his Ph.D. in economics (1987) from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write his seminal book on global income inequality, Worlds Apart (2005). He was senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005) and has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland (2007-2013) and at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University (1997-2007).
Branko’s main area of work is income inequality, in individual countries and globally, including in pre-industrial societies. In addition to numerous papers for the World Bank, he has published articles on these topics in Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Literature, and Journal of Political Philosophy, among others. His book, The Haves and the Have-nots (2011) was selected by The Globalist as the 2011 “Book of the Year.” His new book, Global Inequality (2016), was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the best political book of 2016 and was translated into twelve languages. It addresses economic and political effects of globalization, including the concept of successive “Kuznets waves” of inequality, largely driven, since the first industrial revolution, by technology and globalization. In October 2017, Branko was awarded (jointly with Mariana Mazzucato) the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Knowledge.
Ruth Milkman
Ruth Milkman is distinguished professor of sociology at The Graduate Center, and at the School of Labor and Urban Studies, City University of New York. She is a sociologist of labor and labor movements who has written on a variety of topics involving work and organized labor in the United States, past and present. Her most recent book is Unfinished Business: Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of U.S. Work-Family Policy (Cornell University Press, 2013), coauthored with Eileen Appelbaum. She has also written extensively about low-wage immigrant workers in the United States, analyzing their employment conditions as well as the dynamics of immigrant labor organizing. She helped lead a multicity team that produced a widely publicized study documenting the prevalence of wage theft and violations of other workplace laws in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, and recently coauthored a study of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In 2012–13 she was the Matina S. Horner Visiting Professor at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute.
Milkman’s prize-winning book Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (1987) is still widely read and cited. Milkman also published a study of U.S. auto workers, Farewell to the Factory (1997) and a study of immigrant unionism, L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (2006). She serves as academic director of the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies and is on the editorial boards of several journals. In 2013 she was given the Public Understanding of Sociology Award by the American Sociological Association.
Salvatore Morelli
Salvatore Morelli is visiting assistant professor at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality and ARC Distinguished Fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He holds a D.Phil. in economics from the University of Oxford and is also a research associate at the Center for Studies of Economics and Finance (CSEF) at the University of Naples, “Federico II”.
His current research projects focus on the estimation of personal wealth concentration and its evolution over time. His research to date has also investigated the distributional effect of macroeconomic crises, with particular reference to top income groups; the empirical and theoretical foundations of the view that inequality may contribute to economic and financial instability; and the evolution and measurement of several dimensions of economic inequality over time for a series of countries.
James A. Parrott
James Parrott has over 30 years of experience in New York City economic and fiscal issues from positions in city and state government and the private sector. Most recently he was deputy director and chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute. He regularly analyzes the city’s economy and job market and has written extensively on income inequality and the City and State budgets and tax policies. His research helped bring over $20 million in federal funds to New York following 9/11 to aid dislocated workers, and he coordinated the economic research in support of New York State’s $15 minimum wage policies adopted in 2015 and 2016. He has been one of the leaders in the citywide campaign to raise wages for nonprofit workers providing services under government contract, and this year in advocating for salary parity for all nonprofit early childhood educators.
James was co-author along with UC Berkeley’s Michael Reich in the 2018 analysis that laid the basis for New York City’s path-breaking minimum pay standard for app-dispatched drivers. Parrott served on Governor Cuomo’s 2013 Tax Reform and Fairness Commission and currently serves on the New York City Advisory Commission on Property Tax Reform, the most comprehensive reform effort over the past 25 years. Parrott is a frequent media commentator on economic and fiscal issues, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Daily News, and The American Prospect. He has taught public policy and labor economics at CUNY institutions, and taught a graduate course on the gig economy at The New School this past semester.
James received his B.A. in American Studies from Illinois Wesleyan University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Ryan A. Smith
Ryan A. Smith is currently an associate professor in the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College (CUNY), where he served as the Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Chair of Social Justice. He received his doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, his M.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a former scholar-in-residence at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a frequent guest lecturer, workshop facilitator, moderator, panelists and consultant to numerous nonprofit, for-profit and government agencies on a variety of issues pertaining to organizational change, workplace diversity, and social policies designed to increase equality of opportunity in the workplace. As a scholar, his primary areas of research are workplace inequality and racial attitudes in America. His research has been featured in several book chapters and numerous peer-reviewed professional journals including: American Sociological Review, Work and Occupations, Social Problems, Sociological Quarterly, Social Forces, Annual Review of Sociology, American Behavioral Scientist, the Du Bois Review, and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. His research findings have been cited in newspaper and magazine articles.
Dara Strolovitch
Dara Z. Strolovitch is professor at Princeton University, where she holds appointments in Gender and Sexuality Studies, African American Studies, and the Department of Politics. Prior to joining the faculty at Princeton, she was associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. She received her B.A. in political science and women’s studies from Vassar College and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. Her research combines qualitative, quantitative, and interpretive methods to explore the intersecting politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality in a polity marked by enduring, overlapping, and structural inequalities. Her 2007 book, Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics, addressed these issues by examining the extent to which and the ways in which advocates for women, people of color, and low-income people represent intersectionally marginalized subgroups of their constituencies. Affirmative Advocacy was awarded the APSA’s Gladys Kammerer Award for the best book on U.S. national policy, APSA’s Political Organizations and Parties section’s Leon Epstein Award, the American Sociological Association’s Race, Gender, and Class section’s Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, and the Association for Research on Nonprofits and Voluntary Action’s Virginia Hodgkinson Prize. Her current book project, tentatively titled, When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People, examines the political construction of crises and their implications for marginalized groups.
Bruce Western
Bruce Western is the Bryce Professor of Sociology and Social Justice and co-director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. His research has examined the causes, scope, and consequences of the historic growth in U.S. prison populations. Current projects include a randomized experiment assessing the effects of criminal justice fines and fees on misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma City, and a field study of solitary confinement in Pennsylvania state prisons. Western is also the Principal Investigator of the Square One Project that aims re-imagine the public policy response to violence under conditions of poverty and racial inequality. He was the Vice Chair of the National Academy of Sciences panel on the causes and consequences of high incarceration rates in the United States. He is the author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018), and Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar, and a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. Western received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was born in Canberra, Australia.