Sylvia Allegretto is a labor economist and co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley. CWED is a research center housed at the Institute for Researcher on Labor and Employment. Dr. Allegretto received her Ph. D. in economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder and worked for several years at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC where she is currently a research associate. Allegretto co-authored several editions of The State of Working America and she most recently authored The State of Working America’s Wealth (2011).
Her research interests include long-term unemployment, family budgets, teacher pay, public employee compensation, low-wage labor markets, inequality, minimum wages and sub-minimum wages received by tipped workers. Allegretto closely tracks a myriad of economic statistics with particular interest in the labor market and how typical workers are faring. She is often called upon by media outlets to provide commentary and contextualize economic data and trends.
Bill Lester is an associate professor of urban and regional planning at San José State University, specializing in urban and regional economic development. His research focuses on the role of social institutions and policy interventions in reducing income inequality and promoting balanced economic growth. He also is an expert in policy evaluation and economic impact analysis. Before joining San José State University, he spent 10 years as an associate professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Lester received his Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley, his M.A. in urban planning and policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and his B.A. (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in urban studies and economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
Susan J. Lambert is Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago and director of the Employment Instability, Family Well-Being, and Social Policy Network at the University of Chicago. Lambert studies how employer practices shape the quality of jobs, the lives of low-paid workers, and inequality in the United States. Her research includes randomized experiments conducted in partnership with national retailers, comparative policy evaluations, and analyses of nationally representative surveys that incorporate new questions about work schedules—ones she helped develop. Lambert’s research reveals the widespread prevalence of problematic scheduling practices in today’s U.S. labor market and their negative ramifications for worker well-being and family economic security. The findings from her research have been used to inform both public policy and employer practices. Lambert received a B.A., summa cum laude, in psychology from Eastern Michigan University, and a M.S.W. (social program evaluation) and a Ph.D. in social work and social science (organizational psychology) from the University of Michigan.
To see Lambert discuss some of her research, click here.
Susan Webb Yackee is the director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs. Her research and teaching interests include the U.S. public policymaking process, public management, regulation, administrative law, and interest group politics. Yackee has published articles in a number of journals, including the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
Susan received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Political Science. She earned her B.A. from Concordia College in Business Administration.
Sydnee Caldwell is an assistant professor of business administration at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and an assistant professor of economics at UC Berkeley. Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a senior research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Her research focuses on wage setting and competition in the labor market. She received her B.A. in applied mathematics and economics from UC Berkeley a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Suresh Naidu, a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, is the Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics at Columbia University. Additionally, he is external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and co-director of the Columbia Center on Political Economy. Naidu’s interests are in the economic effects of democracy and non-democracy, monopsony in labor markets, the economics of American slavery, guest worker migration, and labor unions and labor organizing. He holds a B.A. in pure math from the University of Waterloo, a master’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Stephen A. Woodbury is a professor of economics at Michigan State University and a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. His research has focused on unemployment insurance, re-employment programs, nonwage compensation, pensions, and health insurance, and has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Labor Economics, Health Economics, National Tax Journal, and Labour Economics. During 1993–1994, he was deputy director of the Advisory Council on Unemployment Compensation (U.S. Department of Labor), and during 2014–2015, he was a visiting professor in the economics department and the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Stefanie Stantcheva is the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. Stantcheva’s research focuses on the taxation of firms and individuals, as well as how people understand, perceive, and form their attitudes towards public policies. Her work has centered around the long-lasting effects of tax policy—on innovation, education, and wealth. Recently, she has studied how research and development policies can be improved to foster innovation, how income and corporate taxes have shaped innovation over the 20th century, and how student loans can be structured to improve access to education. She has also explored people’s attitudes towards taxation, health care, immigration policies, environmental policies, and social mobility using large-scale Social Economics Surveys and Experiments. Stantcheva holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Cambridge and master’s degrees in economics and economics and finance respectively from the Paris School of Economics and Ecole Polytechnique. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Stephanie Chapman is a senior manager at Cornerstone Research. She received her B.A., B.S., and M.A. from the University of Georgia; and she received her Ph.D. at Northwestern University.
Shayak Sarkar is an acting professor of law at the University of California, Davis. Sarkar's scholarship addresses the structure and legal regulation of inequality. His substantive interests lie in financial regulation, employment law, immigration, and taxation. Sarkar clerked for the Hon. Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Prior to his clerkship, he practiced as an employment attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, where he focused on domestic workers’ rights. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, his J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.S. in economics for development and an M.S. in evidence-based social intervention from Oxford, and an A.B. in applied mathematics and an A.M. in statistics from Harvard.
