Karen Kopecky is an economic and policy adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Her major field of study is macroeconomics with particular interests in inequality, public finance, insurance markets, retirement, health, family, and computational methods for macroeconomic modeling. Kopecky is a visiting scholar of the Economics Department at Emory University. She has been serving as an associate editor at Quantitative Economics since July 2022. Prior to joining the Cleveland Fed in 2023, she was an economist at the Atlanta Fed. She spent 4 years as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario. Kopecky received her Ph.D. in economics in 2007 and her master’s degree in economics in 2003, both from the University of Rochester. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and her Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2001.
Expert Type: Grantee
Svetlozar Nestorov
Svetlozar Nestorov is an associate professor of information systems at Loyola University Chicago’s Quinlan School of Business. His research interests include data mining, high-performance computing, and web technologies. Nestorov received his undergraduate degrees in computer science and mathematics, his M.S. in computer science, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University.
Ivan Rudik
Ivan Rudik is an associate professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. His research focuses on the economics of climate change and the design of climate change and air pollution policies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and B.S. from Rochester Institute of Technology.
Jake Rosenfeld
Jake Rosenfeld is professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis and a resident fellow of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. His research focuses on the political and economic determinants of inequality in the United States and other advanced democracies. Rosenfeld’s 2014 book, What Unions No Longer Do (Harvard University Press), shows in detail the consequences of organized labor’s decline. His 2021 book, You’re Paid What You’re Worth and Other Myths of the Modern Economy (Harvard University Press), seeks to answer the basic question of who gets what and why? Rosenfeld received his Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from Princeton University and his bachelor’s degree in sociology from Haverford College.
Patrick Denice
Patrick Denice is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. His research focuses on nontraditional and extended pathways to and through postsecondary education, the implications of workplace policies and institutions for workers’ wages, and how public-school choice policies shape patterns of racial and ethnic segregation and stratification within and across schools. Some of his recent work has been published in the Sociology of Education, Demography, and the Journal of Urban Affairs. Denice earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Washington in 2016.
Jennifer Laird
Jennifer Laird is an assistant professor of sociology at Lehman College in the City University of New York. Her research uses quantitative and qualitative methods to understand poverty, hardship, and inequality. She has published articles that investigate the sources of poverty differences across U.S. states, employment inequality in the public sector, and immigrant labor force participation. Her research has been published in Demography, Social Science Research, and the American Sociological Review. Since beginning her position as assistant professor in 2018, Laird has served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator in external grant awards totaling more than $1.3 million, with sources including the National Science Foundation and the New America Foundation. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Washington in 2016.
Elizabeth Davis
Elizabeth E. Davis is a professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota. She specializes in the study of public policies relating to children, families, education, and the workforce, particularly in the context of limited resources or low incomes. Her recent research has focused on measuring disparities in access to high-quality child care and the role of child care subsidies in families’ decisions about employment and the type, quality, and stability of child care arrangements. Davis recently served as a member of two National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committees that produced the consensus study reports “Transforming the Financing Early Care and Education” in 2018 and “Vibrant and Healthy Kids: Aligning Science, Practice and Policy to Advance Health Equity” in 2019. For more than 20 years, she has advised state and federal agencies on child care subsidy policy. Davis earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from the University of Michigan and her B.A., summa cum laude, in economics and environmental studies from Bowdoin College.
Derek Lemoine
Derek Lemoine is an associate professor of economics at the University of Arizona, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an associate fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His past research explores how environmental and economic uncertainties affect the design of climate policy and how to use policy to steer energy systems, among other topics. His recent research shows how to learn about the cost of climate change from weather impacts, how to use financial markets to value the production of short-run weather forecasts and climate forecasts, and how to incentivize carbon removal technologies. His Ph.D. is from the University of California, Berkeley.
Jacob William Faber
Jacob William Faber is an associate professor at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service and holds a joint appointment in NYU’s Sociology Department. His research and teaching focuses on spatial inequality. He leverages observational and experimental methods to study the mechanisms responsible for sorting individuals across space and how the distribution of people by race and class interacts with political, social, and ecological systems to create and sustain economic disparities. Faber earned his Ph.D. in sociology from NYU and worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. He also graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with master’s degrees in telecommunications policy and urban studies and planning, and a bachelor’s degree in management science.
Wenfei Xu
Wenfei Xu is an assistant professor in Cornell University's City and Regional Planning Department in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. She is also the director of the Urban Data Research Lab. Her research questions how housing policies, practices, institutions, and technologies have shaped urban inequality, with an orientation toward methods in urban analytics. She works on topics in social-spatial stratification, segregation, race and ethnicity, data science, mapping, and neighborhood change in the United States. Her work has ranged from an interest in the historical legacies of structural housing discrimination and its contemporary spatial-temporal manifestations to exploring the uses of big data in characterizing human activity for urban social science research. Xu received her Ph.D. in urban planning from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, a dual master’s degree in architecture and urban planning from MIT's Department of Architecture and Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and a Bachelor's of Arts in economics from the University of Chicago.