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.
Expert Type: Grantee
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.
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.
Thomas Storrs
Thomas Storrs is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on urban and financial history in the 20th century United States. The intersection, beginning in the 1930s, of home mortgages and the federal government forms the core of his research. Through a blend of land records, quantitative methods, and archival work, he seeks to uncover the extent and consequences of racial inequality attributable to the federal government's selective credit programs, such as the FHA and VA.
Katherine Thomas
Katherine Thomas is a Ph.D. student in sociology at New York University. Thomas’ work uses quantitative and computational methods to address the causes and consequences of spatial inequality. Two of her current research projects address how residential sorting patterns respond to natural hazards and the impacts of discrimination in historical mortgage lending on contemporary racial inequality and segregation. Prior to graduate school, Thomas was a research analyst at the Urban Institute. She received her B.A. in statistics and sociology from Rice University.
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.
Leah Hamilton
Leah Hamilton is the principal investigator of the Family Economic Policy Lab. She is an associate professor of social work at Appalachian State University, a senior fellow at the Jain Family Institute, and a faculty affiliate at the Social Policy Institute of Washington University in St. Louis. She teaches social welfare policy and conducts research on economic justice and basic income. Her book, Welfare Doesn't Work: The Promises of Basic Income for a Failed American Safety Net, was released in 2020. Currently, Hamilton is principal investigator for multiple basic/guaranteed income pilots in New York and Georgia. Her work has been featured in numerous national publications, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNBC, The Atlantic, Forbes, NPR, Fortune, and Fast Company. She serves on the policy council for the Humanity Forward Foundation and formerly served on the Basic Income Earth Network board and as president of the ACLU-NC.
Stephen Roll
Stephen Roll is an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis. His work focuses on promoting asset building, debt management, and economic security in lower-income populations. Most recently, his work has examined the role of cash-transfer programs in improving household balance sheets and economic mobility outcomes, including studies of the Expanded Child Tax Credit and several Guaranteed Income experiments. He is also leading the new Workforce Economic Inclusion and Mobility Project, which examines how low-wage workers navigate public and private benefits programs to achieve financial security. His work has been featured in numerous media outlets, including The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, and he has briefed the White House Domestic Policy Council, the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee, and the U.S. Supreme Court on the results of his research. Roll received his Ph.D. in public policy and management from The Ohio State University.