Jesse Rothstein holds the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also professor of economics. He is the co-director of the California Policy Lab, which he co-founded (with Till von Wachter) in 2017, and a nonresident scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. He previously served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and as senior economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers. From 2015 to 2020, he served as director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley. Rothstein’s research examines education policy, tax and transfer policy, and the labor market. His recent work includes studies of school finance, intergenerational economic mobility, take-up of safety net benefits, and regional and industry wage differentials. His work has been published in leading journals in economics, public policy, education, and law. He has served as an expert witness in several cases regarding teacher evaluation and school finance.
Rothstein is a member of the editorial boards of Industrial Relations, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Education Finance and Policy, and the National Education Policy Center, and of the executive board of the Society of Labor Economists. He was named the John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar by the Labor and Employment Relations Association in 2011. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the National Education Policy Center, the CESifo Research Network, the IZA, and the Learning Policy Institute. He received a Ph.D. in economics and a Master of Public Policy, both from the University of California, Berkeley, and an A.B. from Harvard University.
Janet Gornick is a professor of political science and sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and a nonresident scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. From September 2006 to August 2016, she served as director of LIS (formerly the Luxembourg Income Study), a cross‐national data archive and research center located in Luxembourg, with a satellite office at the Graduate Center. Since 2016, she has served as director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Socio‐Economic Inequality, which includes a LIS satellite office. She has also held the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Distinguished Chair in Socio-Economic Inequality since it was established in 2021.
Most of Gornick’s research is comparative and concerns social welfare policies and their impact on gender disparities in the labor market and/or on income inequality. She has published articles on gender inequality, employment, and social policy in several journals, including American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, Socio‐Economic Review, Journal of European Social Policy, European Sociological Review, Social Science Quarterly, Monthly Labor Review, and Feminist Economics. She regularly presents her work in popular venues, including The American Prospect, Dissent, and Challenge Magazine. Gornick is co‐author or co‐editor of four books: Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (Russell Sage Foundation, 2003), Gender Equality: Transforming Family Divisions of Labor (Verso Press, 2009), Income Inequality: Economic Disparities and the Middle Class in Affluent Countries (Stanford University Press, 2013), and Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Gornick attended Harvard University, where she was awarded a B.A. in psychology and social relations, an M.PA. from the Kennedy School of Government, and a Ph.D. in political economy and government.
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.
Arindrajit Dube is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a nonresident scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. 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.
