Directors

Peter Lanjouw, (PhD London School of Economics), Professor in development economics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is the overall Director and oversees all aspects of LIS’ work. Prior to joining the VU Economics department in January 2015 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.

He has taught courses at the Delhi School of Economics, the Foundation for the Advanced Study of International Development, Tokyo, and the University of Namur, Belgium, and has held a visiting position at the University of California, Berkeley. He is current editor of the World Bank Research Observer and a past assistant editor of the World Bank Economic Review. He is a fellow of the Tinbergen Institute and a core member of the Global Poverty Commission, convened by the World Bank.

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.

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.

Taylor is an economist with a research interest in education and social inequalities. She holds a Master’s degree in Economics from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor’s degree in Business and Economics from York University Glendon Campus.
Before joining LIS, she worked as a research analyst at LISER contributing to the Horizon 2020 PIONEERED project, researching educational (in)equalities in Europe and harmonising national and international education datasets.

Gonçalo holds a Master’s degree in Economics with a major in Policy Evaluation from NOVA School of Business and Economics in Lisbon since 2021. Before joining the LIS, he worked as a Research Assistant in a project aimed at building Portuguese wealth distribution series using survey data and National Accounts.
In 2022 he worked exclusively at the European Central Bank as the DG-Economics trainee in the “Consumer Expectations Survey (CES) project.”

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.

At LIS, Jörg is supervising the data team in harmonizing datasets for the LIS databases, developing and maintaining data production and quality assessment applications, and overseeing the consistency of produced datasets. He is the editor of the LIS newsletter Inequality Matters.

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. At LIS, he serves as a member of the data staff. He has comprehensive knowledge of quantitative social science methods and conducts research using the LIS data, focusing on income and wealth distributions as they relate to economic inequality, poverty, and welfare state politics.

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