Janelle Jones is the vice president of policy and program at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Previously, she was the chief economist and policy director at the Service Employees International Union. Prior, she was the chief economist at the U.S Department of Labor, the first Black woman to serve in that role. Before that, she was an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute working on a variety of labor market topics within EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, and the Economic Analysis and Research Network. She was also a research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, where she worked on topics including racial inequality, unemployment, job quality, and unions, and an economist at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Her research has been cited in The New Yorker, The Economist, Harper’s, The Washington Post, The Review of Black Political Economy, and other publications. Jones holds a B.S. in mathematics from Spelman College and an M.A. in applied economics from Illinois State University.
Expert Type: Grantee
Jane Waldfogel
Jane Waldfogel is a professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University’s Columbia School of Social Work and a visiting professor at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics. She has written extensively on the impact of public policies on child and family well-being. Her books include: Britain’s War on Poverty (Russell Sage Foundation, 2010); Steady Gains and Stalled Progress and Inequality and the Black-White Test Score Gap (Russell Sage Foundation, 2008); What Children Need (Harvard University Press, 2006); Securing the Future: Investing in Children from Birth to College (Russell Sage Foundation, 2000); and The Future of Child Protection: How to Break the Cycle of Abuse and Neglect (Harvard University Press, 1998). Her current research includes studies of work-family policies, improving the measurement of poverty, and understanding social mobility across countries. Waldfogel holds a B.A. in psychology and social relations from Radcliffe College, an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a Ph.D. in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Jacob Mortenson
Jacob Mortenson is a contractor for the Joint Committee on Taxation. He is an applied microeconomist whose research interests include individual and corporate responses to taxation, retirement saving incentives, inequality, and regional economics. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Georgetown University in 2016.
Jacob Robbins
Jacob Robbins was a Dissertation Scholar at Equitable Growth from 2017 – 2018.
Jacob Robbins is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in inequality and macroeconomics, and a nonresident scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. His research uses theory and data to understand key economic trends in the U.S. economy, such as changes in inequality, the rise of monopoly power, and secular stagnation. His research on secular stagnation was awarded the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics best paper of the year in 2020. He received a B.A. in economics and mathematics from Dartmouth College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Brown University.
Heidi Williams
Heidi Williams, a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, is a professor of economics at Dartmouth College. Additionally, she is the director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, co-chair of J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative, and co-director of the innovation policy working group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior, she was the Charles R. Schwab professor of economics and a professor, by courtesy, at Stanford Law School. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the ASHEcon Medal. Her research focuses on how society can best support science and innovation, and how we can best ensure that science and innovation generate broad benefits to society. Williams holds a B.A. in mathematics from Dartmouth College, a M.Sc. in development economics from Oxford University, and her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard.
Heather Sarsons
Heather Sarsons is an assistant professor of economics with research interests in labor, personnel, and behavioral economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Much of her work focuses on understanding how norms, stereotypes, and biases influence labor market outcomes and inequality. Prior to joining Booth, Sarsons was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto's GATE Institute and the university’s Economics Department. Sarsons received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in economics from the University of British Columbia. While pursuing her Ph.D., she was also a visiting student at the London School of Economics.
Guillermo Gallacher
Guillermo Gallacher is an associate economist at Indeed Hiring Lab. Previously, he was an economist and data scientist at Accenture Research (Argentina), and he was an assistant professor the at University of Manitoba. His research interests lie in the areas of labor and macroeconomics. He graduated with a licentiate in economics with honors from Universidad del CEMA. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington.
Hannah Rubinton
Hannah Rubinton is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Her interests are in macroeconomics and economic geography. She has previously worked as a research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and her B.A. in mathematics and economics from McGill University.
Gordon Phillips
Gordon Phillips is the Laurence F. Whittemore Professor of Business Administration and Faculty Director of the Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital at the Tuck School of Business. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a visiting research professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His areas of research include corporate finance and how financial decisions impact firms' strategic decisions, and contracting in financial markets. His work in corporate finance includes studies of private equity issuance, capital structure, Chapter 11 bankruptcy, how leverage buyouts and other forms of high debt influence a firms' and rivals' investment decisions. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University and his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University.
Greg Duncan
Greg Duncan is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine. He spent the first 25 years of his career at the University of Michigan, working on and ultimately directing the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, or PSID, data collection project. Since 1968, the PSID has collected economic, demographic, health, behavior, and attainment data from a representative sample of U.S. individuals and the households in which they reside. With these and other data, Duncan has studied the economic mobility of the U.S. population, both within and across generations, with a particular focus on low-income families. More specifically, he has investigated the roles that families, peers, neighborhoods, and public policy play in affecting the life chances of children and adolescents. Duncan’s research has highlighted the importance of early childhood as a sensitive period for the damaging influences of economic deprivation, as well as for the beneficial impacts of policy-induced income increases for working families. The focus of his more recent research has shifted from these environmental influences to the comparative importance of the skills and behaviors developed during childhood. In particular, he has sought to understand the relative importance of early academic skills, cognitive and emotional self-regulation, and health in promoting children’s eventual success in school and the labor market. He holds a B.A. from Grinnell College and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in economics.