Christopher Wimer is co-director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work. He is also the project director on the Robin Hood Poverty Tracker, which measures poverty in New York City. Wimer conducts research on the measurement of poverty, as well as historical trends in poverty and the impacts of social policies on the poverty rate. He focuses on how families cope with poverty and economic insecurity, with a particular focus on how families manage food insecurity and other forms of material hardship. His work pays particular attention to the role of government policies and programs and their potential impacts on the well-being of low-income families and children. His work has been featured in leading scientific journals including Demography, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Social Service Review, Social Science Research, Criminology, and the Journal of Marriage and Family. Wimer received his Ph.D. in sociology and social policy from Harvard University.
Expert Type: Grantee
Carlos Olmedo
Carlos Olmedo earned his Ph.D. from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focused on various dimensions of low-income housing informality, including housing and health conditions, self-help strategies, title regularization, developer foreclosure practices, and fuel poverty. Olmedo received a B.BA. in international business from UT Austin and an M.S. in economics from the University of Texas at El Paso, and was previously associate director for the Institute for Policy and Economic Development at UT El Paso.
Bradley Setzler
Bradley Setzler is an assistant professor of economics at Pennsylvania State University. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral fellow in economics at the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago. His primary field of research is labor economics. He focuses on the sources of income risk to workers and the protection provided to their families by social insurance. He received his M.A. in economics from University of Chicago and his B.S. in mathematics and philosophy from University of South Carolina.
Brian Callaci
Brian Callaci is the chief economist at the Open Markets Institute. He researches and writes about market structure, antitrust law, and their relationship to worker and employer power. Callaci received his B.A. in economics from Franklin & Marshall College and his M.A. and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Bradley Hardy
Bradley Hardy is an associate professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and nonresident senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. His research interests lie within labor economics, with an emphasis on economic instability, intergenerational mobility, poverty policy, and socioeconomic outcomes. His recent work examines trends and sources of income volatility, intergenerational mobility, and neighborhood economic development within the United States, with a focus on socioeconomically disadvantaged families. He also conducts research on the role of anti-poverty transfer programs such as the Supplemental NutritionAssistance Program and the Earned Income Tax Credit for improving economic well-being among low-income individuals and families. Hardy holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Kentucky, a master’s of public policy from Georgetown University, and a B.A. in economics from Morehouse College.
Blythe George
Blythe George is a member of the Yurok Tribe of California and an assistant professor at the University of California, Merced. She previously served as a presidential postdoctoral fellow in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on processes of adversity and resilience in tribal communities, with an emphasis on qualitative methodologies and database creation and management. Blythe received a B.A. in sociology from Dartmouth College, an M.A. in sociology from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Sociology & Social Policy Joint Degree program.
Barbara Kiviat
Barbara Kiviat is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. She is an economic sociologist who studies how moral beliefs and other cultural understandings shape markets and justify the inequalities they produce. She is particularly interested in how normative ideas influence the pricing and allocation of socially important resources, such as insurance, credit, and jobs. Her current project considers how these dynamics play out when corporations use massive amounts of personal data to decide what to offer to individual consumers. Kiviat’s work has been published in American Sociological Review, Socio-Economic Review, Socius, and Social Service Review. She has a Ph.D. in sociology and social policy from Harvard University and an M.P.A. from New York University, an M.A. in journalism from Columbia University, and a B.A. in the writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Previously, she was a staff writer at Time magazine.
Armin Rick
Armin Rick is an assistant professor of economics at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He specializes in applied microeconomic theory with a focus on the economics of information and communication. His recent research centers on the role of communication error and transparency of economic actions in situations with asymmetric information. His work shows that appropriately limiting transparency can often improve the economic efficiency of communication mechanisms, in particular with respect to the equilibrium trade-off between information transmission and communication costs. He is similarly interested in labor market inequality and the economics of crime and human capital accumulation. In recent work, he and his collaborators assess the effect of the boom in U.S. prison populations on measures of labor market inequality and the extent to which this boom can be attributed to changes in the punitiveness of the criminal justice system. Rick holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago, as well as master’s degrees in economics from the University of Chicago and the University of Mannheim in Germany.
Atif Mian
Atif Mian is a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Steering Committee, the John H. Laporte, Jr. Class of 1967 professor of economics, public policy, and finance at Princeton University, and director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Prior to joining Princeton in 2012, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His current work focuses on the deeper implications of rising inequality for the macroeconomy—including growth, financial markets, monetary policy and fiscal policy. His 2014 book, House of Debt, with Amir Sufi builds upon powerful new data to describe how debt precipitated the Great Recession. The book explains why debt continues to threaten the global economy and what needs to be done to fix the financial system. House of Debt is critically acclaimed by the New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The Atlantic, among others. Mian’s research has appeared in top academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of Financial Economics. Mian holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with computer science and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Arindrajit Dube
Arindrajit Dube is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor. Dube’s work focuses on labor economics, health economics, public finance, and political economy. Some of his current areas of research include minimum wage policies, effects of unions, monopsony in the labor market, firm wage policies, and fairness concerns at the workplace. Dube received his Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and Master of Arts in development policy from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.