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.
Scott Nelson is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Nelson’s research focuses on consumer credit markets, in particular how regulation interacts with information asymmetries and market structure, and how consumers make choices about borrowing, deleveraging, and default. His research uses a range of data sources, including credit reports, credit card account data, surveys, court filings, and employment data, together with models of consumer and firm behavior to understand the drivers of credit market outcomes. His research on the U.S. credit card market was awarded the AQR Top Finance Graduate Award in 2018.
Prior to joining the Booth School of Business, Nelson spent a postdoctoral year with the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Princeton University. He has also been a research fellow with the City of Boston Office of Financial Empowerment, a visiting graduate fellow with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow. Nelson earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before his studies at MIT, Nelson worked as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and at Innovations for Poverty Action, where he was a member of the U.S. Household Finance Initiative. He received a B.A. (summa cum laude) in economics and mathematics from Yale College.
Sean Reardon is the endowed professor of poverty and inequality in education and is professor of sociology at Stanford University. His research focuses on the causes, patterns, trends, and consequences of social and educational inequality, the effects of educational policy on educational and social inequality, and in applied statistical methods for educational research. Reardon is the developer of the Stanford Education Data Archive, or SEDA. Based on 300 million standardized test scores, SEDA provides measures of educational opportunity, average test score performance, academic achievement gaps, and other information for every public school district in the United States. Reardon received his doctorate in education in 1997 from Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a recipient of the William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award, the National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship, and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.
