Randall Akee is a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, Executive Office of the President. He is currently on leave from his position as an associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, he served as a David M. Rubenstein fellow in economic studies at The Brookings Institution. Akee is an applied microeconomist and has worked in the areas of labor economics, economic development, and migration. He served on the National Advisory Council on Race, Ethnic, and Other Populations at the U.S. Census Bureau. Akee is a research fellow at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He completed his doctorate at Harvard University in June 2006.
Expert Type: Grantee
Florian Ederer
Florian Ederer is an associate professor of economics at the Yale University School of Management and a research staff member at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics. Ederer’s research, which has been widely published in leading journals, is in the areas of organizational economics, innovation, and industrial organization. It focuses on the incentive design in organizations, how it shapes innovation, and how it is, in turn, affected by social interactions and more realistic assumptions about the motives of principals and agents. Some of his recent work explores the impact of common ownership on managerial compensation and the existence and pervasiveness of “killer acquisitions” that prevent startups from challenging dominant market incumbents. In his academic work, he draws on a broad set of tools often combining theoretical models, experimental methods, and empirical analysis. Prior to joining the Yale School of Management, Ederer was a faculty member of the University of California, Los Angeles Anderson School of Management. He earned his doctorate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his master’s and undergraduate degrees from the University of Oxford.
Peter Norlander
Peter Norlander is an associate professor of management at the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago. Norlander’s research interests include alternative work arrangements such as outsourcing, remote work, and gig work, labor market power, and the evolution of labor and management practices. He holds a B.S. in industrial and labor relations from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and a Ph.D. in management and organizations from the University of California, Los Angeles Anderson School of Management.
Elena Prager
Elena Prager is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School. Her research uses empirical analyses of large, detailed datasets to answer policy-relevant questions about the labor market and the healthcare market. She has analyzed merger and acquisition activity and its impact on workers, work requirements in social welfare programs, the formation of health insurance provider networks, and drivers of healthcare prices. Prager’s research often addresses antitrust questions. In 2021 and 2022, she served in government as a visiting economist at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. Prager completed her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business in 2016.
Ruth Milkman
Ruth Milkman is a distinguished professor of sociology at the City University of New York and also at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, where she serves as chair of the Labor Studies program. Milkman 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. She was elected the 2016 president of the American Sociological Association. She spent 21 years as a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she directed the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment from 2001 to 2008. She is the author of Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat (Polity, 2020), among other books. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Candace Miller
Candace Miller is an assistant professor of sociology and organizational science at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She previously was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity and a visiting assistant professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Her research interests have focused on race/ethnicity, urban sociology, and culture. Miller is currently working on a book based on a mixed-methods examination of the disparate impacts of gentrification on black-owned and white-owned businesses in Detroit, Michigan. In addition, she has recently examined how arts organizations are distributed among poor and minority urban neighborhoods, how students from different racial groups construct spatial meaning and interpret a sense of belonging on a public university campus, and how race and gender create inequality in and among biology Ph.D. students in laboratory workspaces. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Virginia in 2019.
Daniel Reck
Daniel Reck is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Maryland. Prior, he was an assistant professor at the London School of Economics. His research interests include tax evasion and behavioral welfare economics. His research has been published in the Journal of Public Economics, American Economic Journal, American Economic Review, and Journal of Political Economy. His recent and ongoing work on tax evasion studies the effect of new enforcement policies on tax evasion via offshore accounts in the United States, and the relationship between tax evasion and the distribution of income and wealth. He also studies optimal policymaking in behavioral economics and the effects of minimum wage rules on youth employment. Reck received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
Hilary Wething
Hilary Wething is an assistant professor of public policy at the Penn State School of Public Policy. Her research examines the relationship between economic volatility and labor market policy, household decision-making, and social safety-net programs. Her dissertation investigated the degree to which workers’ employment characteristics affect their earnings volatility and assessed whether public employment policy, such as minimum wage or paid sick leave policy, can mitigate or exacerbate earnings volatility. She holds a Ph.D. in public policy and management, with concentrations in demography and economics, from the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington, and undergraduate degrees in mathematics and economics from Creighton University.
Abhay Aneja
Abhay Aneja is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His fields of interest in economics are political economy, economic history, and labor economics. His areas of interest in law include the law of democracy, criminal justice, and law and inequality. His current research projects focus on how democratic institutions and criminal justice systems shape inequality, and in particular, the socioeconomic outcomes of historically marginalized subpopulations. His primary project uses the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to examine how the re-enfranchisement of African Americans and subsequent protection of their political rights contributed to their improved economic status between 1950 and 1980. Other research examines how minority political representation affects targeted violence and the financial consequences of incarceration.
Carlos Fernando Avenancio-Leon
Carlos Fernando Avenancio-León is an assistant professor of finance at the University of California San Diego. He is an economist whose agenda focuses on how complex institutional structures mask or generate economic inequality. In particular, his work addresses the relationship between political or financial institutions and economic redistribution, with special emphasis on its implications for disadvantaged communities. Avenancio-León received a Ph.D. in finance from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from the University of Puerto Rico.