Directors

Daniele Checchi, Professor of Economics in the University of Milan (Italy), is the overall Director and oversees all aspects of LIS’ work. Currently on leave from university duties, he is since January 2020 also the Director of the Research Center of the Italian National Social Security Institute. He holds a MA in Economic and Social Disciplines at Bocconi University (Milan), a M.Sc. degree in Economics at London School of Economics (London, UK) and a PhD in Economics awarded by University of Siena.

He also worked, among other duties, as consultant for the European Commission coordinating the Milan unit under the GINI project “Growing inequalities’ impacts” and was member, over the last five years, of several national committees appointed by the Italian Ministry of Labour.
As Director of the Luxembourg Office of LIS, he oversees all aspects of LIS’ work, including its administrative, management, development, and data production functions.

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.

Teresa Munzi has a background in economics. She earned a degree in Economics from the University of Rome and an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics. Before coming to work at LIS in 2002, she served as an economist at the Economics Directorate of the European Commission in Brussels, at the Chief Economist Office of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Investment in London, and at the UK Department for Education and Employment. At LIS, she is responsible for managing and overseeing all operations in the Luxembourg office.

She also carries out research using the LIS data. Her research interests include the comparative study of welfare systems and their impact on poverty, inequality, and family well-being; and gender differences in employment and earnings.

Josep joined LIS in March 2020 as a Data Scientist. He holds an MSc in Social Policy Analysis from Leuven University and a Political BA in Political Science from Pompeu Fabra University.

Before joining LIS, Josep worked as a Senior Statistician at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). There he was in charge of designing and analysing complex surveys, as well as providing policy impact evaluations.

Gintare is an economist with a background in inequality and social policy. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Vilnius University and a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Human Development from UNU-MERIT/Maastricht University, with a specialisation in social protection financing.

Most recently, Gintare has been pursuing her PhD in health inequality at Maastricht University and the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research. Prior to that, she worked as a consultant for the International Labour Organization in evaluating social protection schemes and as a researcher in a private institute in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Jörg is an economic sociologist. In May 2016, he defended his doctoral dissertation on Pension Systems and Income Inequality among the Elderly in Europe at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim, Germany.

Before joining the LIS data team in 2011, he worked as a Research Associate in a research project on governance of supplementary pension systems across Europe (GOSPE).

Heba holds a master’s degree in Biostatistics and Demography on the topic of The Development of the Multidimensional Poverty Indices from the Institute of Statistical Studies and Research at Cairo University, Egypt.

Before joining the LIS data team, she worked as a Senior Statistician at the Economic Research Forum (ERF) in Egypt and as Individual Consultant for the UNDP Regional Centre for the Arab States in Cairo.

Piotr Paradowski is a political economist. He has comprehensive knowledge of quantitative social science methods, including panel data analysis, survival analysis, multilevel models, and categorical and limited dependent variables models. At LIS, he serves as a member of the data staff; he also conducts research using the LIS data.

Piotr conducts interdisciplinary research with the focus on income and wealth distributions as they relate to economic inequality, welfare state politics, and voting behaviour.

Carmen is a social policy analyst specialised in labour market. She holds a PhD from Tilburg University, The Netherlands, Faculty of Social Sciences, Methodology and Statistics department and has a background in comparative social policy (MA in International Social Policy Analysis from Leuven University, Belgium), public policy and governance as well as political sciences.

Her research is focusing on labour market participation from a gender perspective, institutional, life course and cultural determinants of the labour market participation in later life and early retirement from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective.

Petra Sauer is (LIS)²ER Tony Atkinson research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for Socio-economic Research (LISER) and the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). She is also a fellow of the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (CIDER) and an affiliated scholar of the Individual in the Labour Market (ILM) Reading Group (Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge) as well as the Institute Economics of Inequality (INEQ, Vienna University of Economics and Business). She obtained her PhD in Economics from the Vienna University of Economics and Business in 2015.

In her research, Petra is concerned with the causes and consequences of social and economic inequalities which stem from unequal educational opportunities and labour market experiences across socio-economic groups. She currently works on the distributional consequences of educational expansion and inequalities in work quality, and leads a project financed by the Austrian Central Bank on the “digitally-based self-employment”. Her research has been published, among others, in the Review of Income and Wealth and the Journal of Economic Surveys. In 2018, she obtained the Kurt-Rotschild award for her effort to disseminate scientific findings to a broader public audience

Lorena is an economist with a demonstrated history of working on methodological and socioeconomic topics. Skilled in data analysis and quantitative methods, she is mainly interested in how living standard indicators should be measured and effectively compared across countries. After spending five years working with policymakers and governmental research in Brazil, she was eager to expand her professional horizon. By moving to Europe, she had the opportunity to contribute to projects for Eurostat, the World Bank and LISER. She holds a master’s degree in Economics from the São Paulo State University and is currently pursuing her PhD in Social and Economic Sciences at the University of Antwerp.