June 2, 2026
The Stone Center’s sixth cohort of postdoctoral scholars, Zhexun Mo and Severin Rapp, will start new positions this fall after they complete their two-year terms at the Graduate Center. Mo will join the economics department of Laval University in Quebec City, Canada, as an assistant professor, and Rapp will join the London School of Economics (LSE) as a research officer in the International Inequalities Institute (III).
During his first semester at Laval University, Mo will teach a doctoral-level class on economic inequalities. The following semester he plans to teach a larger introductory course on the same topic, tailored for undergraduate students across various disciplines in the social sciences.
While he was a Ph.D. student, Mo taught mathematics courses and introduction to development economics, and worked as a teaching assistant for economic history and inequality courses. He is now looking forward to designing a class from beginning to end. “Economic inequalities is a topic I’m very familiar with and passionate about, so that will be a good experience,” he says. “It’s great to have the chance to transmit knowledge about these issues to students and to also make them interested in economics research.”
During his time at the Stone Center, Mo appreciated the flexibility he had to travel to conferences all over the world, he says. “On top of that, New York is itself a large research hub, so I got to meet a lot of different people and colleagues who came here to talk about their research,” he says. “And there are so many people here who are specifically researching inequality, which is a big plus.”
Mo worked closely with Professor Branko Milanovic over the last two years, and is expecting to complete at least one coauthored paper with him in the coming months. He also has six papers in the Stone Center Working Paper Series. One was published last year in the European Journal of Political Economy; another was published this spring in the Journal of Public Economics.
At the III, Rapp plans to work on issues connected to inequality and intergenerational transmission of advantage. “In some ways, I’ll continue to work on projects that I’ve worked on here, including work on inheritances and wealth transfers,” he says. “I’m also going to help Francisco Ferreira and his team at the LSE to maintain, expand, and use their database on inequality of opportunity around the world.” Ferreira, the director of the III, is also an affiliated scholar of the Stone Center; the III hosts a satellite office of LIS, as does the Stone Center.
Rapp worked on expanding the database of the GC Wealth Project during his time at the Stone Center. He recently wrote a behind-the-scenes explanation of the project’s new data warehouse on private wealth, which draws on more than 350 sources across countries to offer researchers, policymakers, and the public tools to study the evolution and persistence of wealth and inequality. The background piece accompanied an article about the data warehouse that was published in March by Nature’s Scientific Data journal. Rapp is also the coauthor of three Stone Center Working Papers.
Rapp will miss his daily interactions at the Stone Center, he says. “What I found particularly cool at the Stone Center was having the chance to regularly speak to other postdocs and the Senior Scholars, including Janet [Gornick], Branko, and Miles [Corak],” he says. “That’s an incredible opportunity.” He also valued contributing to the GC Wealth Project. “I came here mostly as an applied microeconomist, and then Salvatore [Morelli, the GC Wealth Project Director] invited me to contribute to the project by overseeing and expanding the Topography section of the GC Wealth Project website, and that has certainly helped me to much better understand those sorts of relationships and concepts in international accounts. That’s something I’m now using in my own work, which has certainly been very helpful.”
The Stone Center’s eighth cohort of postdoctoral scholars will start in September. They will join Naomi Crowther and Marai Hayes, who are halfway through their appointments.
For a full list of the Stone Center’s current and former postdoctoral scholars, and more information about the program, see the Postdoctoral Scholars page.
