Affiliated Scholars

François Bourguignon is an Emeritus Professor at the Paris School of Economics (PSE) where he has been the former Director from 2007 to the end of January 2013. He is the former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the World Bank (2003-2007). Trained as a statistician, he obtained a PhD. in Economics at the University of Western Ontario, followed by a State Doctorate at the University of Orleans in France. His work is both theoretical and empirical and principally aims at the distribution and the redistribution of revenue in developing and developed countries. He is the author of a great number of books and articles in specialized national and international economic journals. He has taught throughout Universities worldwide. He has received, during the course of his career, a number of scientific distinctions/decorations/has been decorated. Through his experience, he is often sought for counsel to Governments and international organisations throughout the world.

Conchita D’Ambrosio is Professor of Economics at the University of Luxembourg. She is an economist, with a Ph.D. from New York University (2000). Her research interests have revolved around the study of individual and social well-being. She has published in Economica, International Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Social Choice and Welfare, the Review of Income and Wealth among other academic journals.

Louis Chauvel is a French sociologist, Professor at the University of Luxembourg and winner of the Chair PEARL “Programme Excellence for Award of Research in Luxembourg” on social welfare, income and wealth and social change in a comparative perspective. He is the author of Le destin des générations, structure sociale et cohortes en France du XXe siècle aux années 2010, and various articles that have appeared in journals such as Social Forces, and Review of Income and Wealth.

Daniele Checchi is Professor of Economics at the University of Milan in Italy, working at Italian National agency for the Evaluation of the University system. His research interests, published in journals like Economic Policy, Journal of Public Economics, European Sociological Review etc., span from inequalities in educational attainments to educational policies, from wage inequalities to the role of labour market institutions in shaping inequalities of opportunities.

Frank Cowell is Professor of Economics at Suntory & Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, at London School of Economics. His research interests focus on the underlying principles of inequality measurement and its relation to welfare economics, as well as distributional analysis, and information theory. He has published several books at Cambridge University Press, and various research articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Economic Surveys, Social Choice and Welfare, and Research on Economic Inequality.

Janet Gornick is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY) in the United States. She has held various positions at LIS for over twenty-five years, and has served as Director from 2006 to 2016. She is currently the director of the Stone Center and of the US Office of LIS at The Graduate Center of CUNY. Her numerous articles have been published in several journals, including American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of European Social Policy, Feminist Economics, and Monthly Labor Review.

Markus Jäntti is Professor of Economics at the Swedish Institute for Social Research at Stockholm University in Sweden. He holds a PhD in Economics from Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland. He was LIS’ Research Director from 2005 to 2014. His current research centers on income and wealth inequality, and poverty and socio-economic mobility, with a focus on cross-national comparisons. He is especially interested in the importance of family background in the distribution of economic resources.

Paul Krugman is a Distinguished Scholar at the Stone Center. Before joining the Graduate Center in New York, Krugman was professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. In 2008, he was the sole recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade theory. In 2011, his blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal”, was ranked number one of The 25 Best Financial Blogs by Time magazine.

Peter Lanjouw, Professor in development economics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is LIS overall Director and oversees all aspects of LIS’ work. Prior to joining the VU Economics department he had spent more than two decades in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank, most recently as Manager of the Poverty and Inequality team. His main research interests are: i) measurement and analysis of poverty and inequality in developing countries; ii) structural transformation in developing economies; and iii) contribution of longitudinal village studies to the analysis of rural development. His work was published in journals like Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Economic Inequality, The Review of Income and Wealth etc.

Kun Lee is an Assistant Professor of Social Welfare Policy at the Department of Social Welfare, Seoul National University. Previously, Kun was Tony Atkinson Fellow under the LIS2ER Joint Initiative at LIS and Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, as well as visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, Finnish Centre for Pensions, University of Mannheim and Humboldt University of Berlin. He holds a PhD in Social Policy from the University of Oxford. Kun is a quantitative social scientist whose comparative research examines how welfare institutions and social policies shape social inequalities amid demographic change and evolving labour markets. His work focuses on pensions, labour markets, poverty, income and wealth inequality, and social policy attitudes. His research has appeared in leading journals, including the Journal of European Social Policy, Social Forces, Social Policy & Administration, and Socio-Economic Review.

Branko Milanovic is a leading scholar on income inequality who joined The Graduate Center as Visiting Presidential Professor and Senior Scholar in the Stone Center. Before coming to the LIS Center, he was Lead Economist in the World Bank’s research department. He is the author of The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality and numerous articles on the global income distribution.

Philippe Van Kerm is Professor of Social Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Luxembourg since 2017 on a joint appointment with the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER). He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Namur (Belgium). His research interests are in applied micro-econometrics, labour and welfare economics and social policy. He has been a visiting researcher or research fellow at the London School of Economics and the University of Leuven and is currently a fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (University of Essex), the Institute for New Economic Thinking (University of Oxford), the Stone Center on Socioeconomic Inequality (City University of New York) and ZEW Mannheim, and is currently a fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (University of Essex) and the Institute for New Economic Thinking (University of Oxford).