Adrienne Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint public policy and sociology program at Duke University. Her research interests include stratification, inequality, and mobility, which she examines through the lens of employment, training, and public policy. She is particularly interested in the employment and training experiences of Black workers living in the American South. Jones’ dissertation project examines how driver’s license suspensions structure opportunities for mobility among participants of the Durham Expunction and Restoration Project’s Second Chance Driving program. She received a B.A. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011 and a master’s degree in public policy from the Sanford School at Duke University in 2014.
Expert Type: Grantee
Dilan Eren
Dilan Eren is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Boston University. She works at the intersection of work, occupations, and organizations by adopting a cultural sociology lens to examine topics of social inequality. Her dissertation, “The Self-Taught Economy: Open-Access and Inclusion in the Tech Industry,” studies how aspiring developers without a computer science degree make sense of and use open access to coding skills to get jobs in tech. She adopts a longitudinal perspective and uses multiple methods, including surveys, in-depth interviews, and digital ethnography and observations, to understand how open access to coding initiatives may or may not alter the existing regimes of inequalities and make tech more or less diverse. Eren holds both a B.A. and an M.A. in sociology from Bogazici University in Turkey.
H. Luke Shaefer
H. Luke Shaefer is the Hermann and Amalie Kohn professor of social justice and social policy and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. He is also a professor of social work and the inaugural director of Poverty Solutions, an interdisciplinary, presidential initiative that partners with communities and policymakers to find new ways to prevent and alleviate poverty. Shaefer has presented his research at the White House and before numerous federal agencies, has testified before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, and has advised a number of the nation’s largest human service providers. He received his B.A. in politics from Oberlin College, and his A.M. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration.
Mario Leccese
Mario Leccese is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research is in the areas of industrial organization, innovation, and information economics. In particular, it focuses on the determinants of market power, its role in preventing markets to function efficiently, and what public policies can do to promote competition and innovation. The main chapter of his dissertation examines the relationship between venture capitalists’ common ownership of competing technology ventures and ventures’ outcomes. Leccese received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in economics from Bocconi University, and his M.A. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Gabriel Unger
Gabriel Unger will be a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab starting in the fall of 2022, after receiving a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He jointly completed a J.D. at Yale Law School. His research broadly attempts to understand how technological changes, such as the IT Revolution, change our understanding of basic macroeconomic questions, including the mechanics of economic growth, or the business cycle.
Natalie Duncombe
Natalie Duncombe is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research explores how workers adapt to labor market shocks and what these shocks mean for macroeconomic outcomes. Her current projects examine how workers reallocate following replacement by automation and the consequences of differential exposure of workplace sexual harassment by gender. Duncombe has previously worked at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and she received her B.A. in economics from Grinnell College.
Rafael Becerril Arreola
Rafael Becerril Arreola is an assistant professor of marketing and the Business Partnership Foundation dean’s fellow at the Moore School of Business. He applies his training in business, economics, and engineering to study the general and disparate effects of consumer socioeconomics and technology on consumer behavior, business decisions, and market outcomes. With his research, Arreola seeks to facilitate the design, optimization, implementation, and evaluation of managerial decisions and public policies. He received a Ph.D. in management with a concentration in quantitative marketing and economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto, and an undergraduate degree in electrical and computer engineering from ITESM campus Toluca.
Josh Feng
Josh Feng is an assistant professor in the Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. His research focuses on the organization of prescription drug markets, intellectual property, and the direction innovation. Feng received his Ph.D. in economics and A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard University.
Ginger Jin
Ginger Zhe Jin is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Most of her research focuses on information asymmetry among economic agents and how to provide information to overcome the information problem. Her research has been published in leading economics, management, and marketing journals, with support from the National Science Foundation, the Net Institute, and the Sloan Foundation. She was the director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics from January 2016 to July 2017 and an Amazon scholar from January 2019 to May 2020. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000.
Liad Wagman
Liad Wagman is a professor of economics and the John and Mae Calamos Dean of the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is also an affiliate professor of economics at the Lewis College at the Illinois Institute of Technology and a competition fellow at the Data Catalyst Institute. Wagman is an economist who studies the regulation of digital markets, including policies concerning privacy, antitrust, entrepreneurship, and innovation. From 2020 to 2022, he served as senior economic and technology advisor at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Office of Policy Planning. Wagman received his Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from Duke University and his M.S. in computer science from Stanford University.