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.
Expert Type: Grantee
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 and a nonresident scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. 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 and a nonresident scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. 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.
Antoine Arnoud
Antoine Arnoud is an economist at the International Monetary Fund. His research focuses on the interaction between technology, institutions, and inequality. His recent work analyses how wage bargaining can be affected by technological possibilities to automate occupations and how this mechanism can lead to wage inequality, heterogeneity in the return to experience, and other aspects of the labor market. Antoine also develops computational tools used to combine more accurately data from different sources in order to study consumption, income, and wealth inequality. Arnoud earned an M.S. in economics from the Paris School of Economics, Tsinghua University, China, and Ecole Polytechnique, France, and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University.
Randy Albelda
Randy Albelda is professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Boston as well as a senior research fellow at the university’s Center for Social Policy. Albelda has worked as research director of the Massachusetts State Senate’s Taxation Committee and the legislature’s Special Commission on Tax Reform. Her research and teaching covers a broad range of economic policies affecting low-income women and families. In addition to many academic journal articles and policy reports, she is coauthor of the books, Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women’s Work, Women’s Poverty; Unlevel Playing Fields: Understanding Wage Inequality and Wage Discrimination; and The War on the Poor: A Defense Manual. Albelda co-led the Bridging the Gaps project bringing together researchers and advocates from nine states and Washington, DC to examine the gaps between basic needs and earnings in light of welfare reform in the 1990s.
Andreas Mueller
Andreas I. Mueller is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining UT Austin, he was an associate professor at Columbia Business School. Mueller received his doctorate from the IIES, Stockholm University, and was awarded the Arnbergska Prize for his dissertation work by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His research spans a broad spectrum of issues in macroeconomics, labor economics, and monetary economics, and has been published in leading academic journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of Labor Economics, and covered in The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times. Mueller is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research, and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics.