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.
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).
Sarah K. Bruch
Sarah K. Bruch is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses broadly on social stratification and public policy. In particular, she focuses on integrating theoretical insights from relational and social theorists into the empirical study of inequalities. She brings this approach to the study of social policy, education, race, politics, and citizenship. Her work has been published in leading academic journals including the American Sociological Review, Sociology of Education, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Child Development. Her current research includes three streams. The first focuses on U.S. social policies, examining their social and distributional impacts as well as their consequences for civic and political life. The second focuses on schools as organized sites of racialized authority relations that shape life trajectories and function as formative experiences of citizenship. The third focuses on the interplay of racial and economic inequalities, seeking to clarify how they relate to each other, how they are connected to state policy choices, and how they are produced through specific relational and policy mechanisms.
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.
Paula England
Paula England is professor of sociology at New York University. She is the author of two books, Households, Employment, and Gender and Comparable Worth, and many articles. Her early research focused on occupational sex segregation and the sex gap in pay. She has also written on the effects of motherhood on women’s pay. Her recent research is on relationships, contraception, sexuality, and nonmarital births. She is the winner of the American Sociological Association’s 1999 Jessie Bernard award for career contributions to scholarship on gender, and of the 2010 Distinguished Career award from the Family section of ASA. During 2014-15 she was the president of the American Sociological Association.
Michael F. Förster
Michael F. Förster is a senior policy analyst at the OECD Social Policy Division. He has been working in different departments at the OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs since 1986 and, particularly, has been involved in successive OECD work on income distribution and poverty. He is co-author of Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty Trends in the OECD Area (OECD, 2008) and lead author of the follow-up study, Divided we Stand: Why Inequality keeps rising (OECD, 2011) and the most recent report In It Together – Why Less Inequality Benefits All (OECD, 2015). This latter publication analyses the impact of the Great Recession and consolidation policies on inequalities in OECD countries; the distributive effects of employment structure changes; recent poverty and inequality trends in OECD and emerging economies; and the impact of increasing inequality on growth. He is currently directing several follow-up projects, including work on inter- and intergenerational income mobility and trends among middle-income classes. 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 Policy, Vienna (2000-2004). He studied economics at the Universities of Vienna, Austria (M.A.) and Saarbrücken, Germany and holds a Ph.D. from University of Liège, Belgium. Förster who is an Austrian citizen is member of several scientific advisory boards of international research projects, and a member of the French national observatory of poverty and social exclusion (ONPES). He is author of various journal articles, research papers and book contributions, most recently to the Elsevier Handbook of Income Distribution (2015).
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 of the City University of New York. She has also served, since 2006, 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. 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 director of the doctoral program in public and urban policy, and jointly appointed as an associate professor of economics and urban policy at The Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy and the Department of Economics, The New School for Social Research at The New School in New York. He is a faculty research fellow at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at The New School, the president of the National Economic Association (NEA), an associate director of the Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics Program, serving on the Board of Overseers for the General Social Survey (GSS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Social Observatories Coordinating Network (SOCN), the National Academies of Sciences standing committee on Future of Major NSF-Funded Social Science Surveys and co-principal investigator of the Ford Foundation funded National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color Project (NASCC). He is a stratification economist, whose work fuses scientific methods to examine the causes, consequences and remedies of racial and ethnic inequality in economic and health outcomes, which includes an examination of the intersection of identity, racism, colorism, and socioeconomic outcomes. His scholarly contributions is evidenced by numerous peer reviewed publications, book chapters in edited volumes; opinion-editorial and popular press articles, funded research, public lectures, presentations and symposiums, service to professional organizations, and regular appearance in print and broadcast media.
Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman is distinguished scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center, at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he also serves, since 2015, as distinguished professor in the Economics Program. In 2008, Krugman was the sole recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade theory. In addition to the Nobel, Krugman is the recipient of John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association, an award given every two years to a top economist under the age of 40. He also received the Asturias Award given by King of Spain, considered to be the European Pulitzer Prize. Krugman’s approach to economics is reaching a new generation of college students. He and Robin Wells have coauthored college textbooks on Micro and Macroeconomics that rank in the top-selling economics textbooks used in American colleges today. He is best-known to the general public as op-ed columnist and blogger for The New York Times. In 2011, his blog, “The Conscience of Liberal,” was ranked number one of “The 25 Best Financial Blogs” by Timemagazine. The blog has approximately 1.5 million Twitter followers. He makes frequent appearances on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, Charlie Rose, PBS NewsHour, Bloomberg Television, CNBC and MSNBC. Author or editor of more than 25 books and over 200 published professional articles, Krugman has written extensively for non-economists as well. Before joining the staff of The New York Times, his work appeared in Fortune, Slate, Foreign Policy, The New Republic and Newsweek. Prior to his appointment at The Graduate Center, Krugman served on the faculties of Princeton, MIT, Yale and Stanford. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the Group of Thirty. He has served as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, as well as to foreign countries including Portugal and the Philippines. In his twenties, he served as senior international economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan.
Mary Clare Lennon
Mary Clare Lennon is professor of sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches in the Ph.D. program in sociology and in the D.P.H. program in public health. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology and a post-doctoral M.S. in biostatistics. Prior to coming to The Graduate Center, she taught at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Her current research focuses on issues related to housing, mobility, and neighborhoods. Her most recent project, funded by NSF, investigates the impact of shared-equity homeownership on residents’ life trajectories. She is also working with colleagues in the UK on a comparative study of residential mobility and child well-being. This study focuses on family and economic stressors encountered by families in the UK and US and on role of social policies in exacerbating or ameliorating these stressors. Her research has been published in a wide range of journals and edited volumes and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), and the National Institutes of Health, among others. She has been a visiting scholar at Princeton and Columbia Universities and is currently visiting professor at University College London’s Institute of Education.
Leslie McCall
Leslie McCall is professor of sociology and political science, and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. She studies public opinion about inequality and related economic and policy issues as well as trends in actual earnings and family income 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, and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University.
Branko Milanovic
Branko Milanovic is presidential professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY and senior fellow at Luxembourg Income Study. He obtained his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He was lead economist in World Bank Research Department for almost 20 years and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003-2005). He held teaching appointments at University of Maryland (2007-2013) and School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University (1997-2007). Milanovic’s main area of work is income inequality, in individual countries and globally, as well as historically, among pre-industrial societies (Roman Empure, Byzantium, and France before the Revolution), and even inequality in soccer. He has published a number of articles on methodology and empirics of global income distribution and effects of globalization (Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Political Philosophy etc.). His most recent book The Haves and the Have-nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, was published in 2011, translated in seven languages, and selected by The Globalist as 2011 “Book of the Year.” His new book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization deals with economic and political issues of globalization, including the redefinition of the “Kuznets cycles”, and will be available in April 2016.
Lawrence Mishel
Lawrence Mishel came to the Economic Policy Institute in 1987 as EPI’s first research director and later became vice president and then president (since 2002). He has played a significant role in building EPI’s research capabilities and reputation. He has written and spoken widely on the economy and economic policy as it affects middle- and low-income families. He is principal author of The State of Working America (published even-numbered year since 1988), which provides a comprehensive overview of the U.S. labor market and living standards. He also leads EPI’s education research program. Prior to joining EPI, Mishel worked as an economist for various unions and taught at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations School. Mishel has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Suresh Naidu
Suresh Naidu is an assistant professor of economics and international affairs at Columbia University. He has a master’s degree in economics from UMass-Amherst and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and works on political economy, economic history, and development economics.
James A. Parrott
James A. Parrott, Ph.D. is the deputy director and chief economist of the Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI), a non-partisan public policy research and education organization committed to improving public policies and private practices to better the economic and social conditions of all New Yorkers. Parrott directs FPI’s economic and labor market analyses, and analyzes New York City and State budgets and tax policies. He is the author of New York City Taxes—Trends, Impact and Priorities for Reform, January 2015. He also has led FPI’s research and education work on labor standards, and minimum and living wage policies. For the past two years he has been one of the leaders in citywide and statewide campaigns to raise wages for nonprofit workers providing services under government contract. Parrott is a frequent media commentator on economic and fiscal policies. FPI’s publications can be found at www.fiscalpolicy.org. Parrott has served in various state advisory positions, including on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Tax Reform and Fairness Commission. He is also a member of the City Finance Commissioner’s Tax Policy and Administration Advisory Board. He 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.
Shahra Razavi
Shahra Razavi is the chief of the Research & Data Section at UN Women. Her research and publications have been on gender dimensions of development, with a focus on agrarian issues, social policy and the care economy. Since January 2013 when she joined UN Women, she has been the research director for UN Women’s flagship reports, Progress of the World’s Women 2015/2016 (Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights), and the World Survey on the Role of Women in Development 2014 (Gender Equality and Sustainable Development). She is the author of more than 40 refereed journal articles and chapters in edited volumes. Her edited publications include Seen, Heard and Counted: Rethinking Care in a Development Context (Blackwell, 2011) and The Unhappy Marriage of Religion and Politics: Problems and Pitfalls for Gender Equality (2010). She grew up in Iran, and obtained her Bachelors from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and her Masters and Ph.D. (D.Phil.) from Oxford University.
Berglind Hólm Ragnarsdóttir
Berglind Hólm Ragnarsdóttir is this workshop’s associate director. She is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research focuses on cross-national stratification and inequality, gender equality, and family well-being. She is currently a research associate in the Luxembourg Income Study Center. She is a recipient of the Leifur Eiríksson Foundation award and a Fulbright scholar.