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 focussed 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.
Maureen Craig
Maureen Craig is assistant professor of psychology at New York University. Her work focuses on understanding social and political attitudes among members of different social groups (e.g., groups based on race, gender, sexuality) from dual perspectives: those of traditionally-stigmatized groups as well as societally-dominant groups. For example, her research explores the conditions under which members of one stigmatized group perceive other stigmatized groups as potential allies, as potential competitors, or as any other outgroup. Another line of work examines how exposure to information about diversity affects majority and minority group members’ intergroup attitudes, social categorization, and political attitudes. She also has interests in how category- and feature-based stereotyping may operate independently or in combination to affect judgments of other people.
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.
Nancy Folbre
Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research explores the interface between political economy and feminist theory, with a particular emphasis on the value of unpaid care work. In addition to numerous articles published in academic journals, she is the editor of For Love and Money: Care Work in the U.S. (Russell Sage, 2012), and the author of Greed, Lust, and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas (Oxford, 2009), Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family (Harvard, 2008), and The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New Press, 2001). She has also written widely for a popular audience, including contributions to The New York Times Economix blog, The Nation, and The American Prospect.
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, 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 new 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 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.
Jessica Hardie
Jessica Hardie is assistant professor in sociology at Hunter College, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Family Demography and Individual Development at Penn State University. She joined the Sociology Department at Hunter as an assistant professor in Fall 2014. She specializes in the areas of sociology of education, inequality, family, and the transition to adulthood. In particular, her research explores how class, race, and gender shape young people’s trajectories through adolescence and young adulthood. She has conducted qualitative and quantitative research on adolescent social capital, race and racism in high school, economic resources and romantic relationship quality among cohabiting and married couples, and the relationship between maternal health and child well-being. She is currently working on a longitudinal qualitative and quantitative study of class and race differences in young women’s transitions to adulthood, with attention to how they balance work, school, and family life during this period.
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.
Christoph Lakner
Christoph Lakner is an economist in the Development Research Group (Poverty & Inequality team) at the World Bank. His research interests include inequality, poverty, and labor markets in developing countries. In particular, he has been working on global inequality, the relationship between inequality of opportunity and growth, implications of regional price differences for inequality, and the income composition of top incomes. He holds a D.Phil., M.Phil. and B.A. in economics from the University of Oxford.
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 CUNY Graduate Center. She was formerly Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University.
Ruth Milkman
Ruth Milkman is distinguished professor of sociology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. 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 multi-city 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.
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.
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 A. Parrott, Ph.D. senior fellow at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. The Center is a long-established applied policy research institute shaping public policy to ensure a more just and equitable city. Parrott directs the Center’s economic and labor market analyses, and analyzes New York City and budget and tax policies. He is the author of New York City Taxes—Trends, Impact and Priorities for Reform. Parrott coordinated the economic research in support of New York State’s $15 minimum wage, and is involved in efforts to ensure the effective implementation of the phased-in $15 wage. He has been one of the leaders in the citywide campaign to raise wages for nonprofit workers providing services under government contract. Parrott is a frequent media commentator on economic and fiscal issues, and has served in various state advisory positions, including on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Tax Reform and Fairness Commission. 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.
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. Dr. Smith 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.
Florencia Torche
Florencia Torche is professor of sociology at Stanford University. She is a social scientist with substantive interests in social demography, stratification, and education. Professor Torche’s scholarship encompasses two related areas. A longer-term area of research studies inequality dynamics — the dynamics that result in persistence of inequality across generations — with a particular focus on educational attainment, assortative mating (who marries who), and the intergenerational transmission of wealth. A more recent area of research examines the influence of early-life exposures –as early as the prenatal period– on individual development, attainment, and socioeconomic wellbeing. She has studied the effect of in-utero exposure to environmental stressors on children’s outcomes, and how these exposures contribute to the persistence of poverty across generations.
Torche’s research combines diverse methodological approaches including quantitative analysis, causal inference, experiments and natural experiments, and in-depth interviews. Much of her research uses an international comparative perspective. She has conducted large cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys, including the first national survey on social mobility in Chile and Mexico. Her work has appeared in journals in sociology and other disciplines, such as the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, the Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, Sociology of Education, Human Reproduction, and the International Journal of Epidemiology. Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation, among others.
Professor Torche holds a B.A. from the Catholic University of Chile and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University.
Laurie C. Maldonado
Laurie C. Maldonado is this workshop’s Associate Director and Research Associate at the Stone Center. She’s a scholar on single-parent families in the U.S. and across countries. Recently, she co-edited a book, The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Families: Resources, Employment and Policies to Improve Wellbeing. She holds a M.S.W. and Ph.D. (as of June 2017!) in social welfare at UCLA.