About the Authors

Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), a research center within the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. She is also the Oliver T. Carr Professor and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University (part time until 2016). Her research interests and publications include multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, welfare economics, the capability approach, the measurement of freedoms and human development. She holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford.

Eirini Andriopoulou holds a MSc from the London School of Economics and a PhD from the Athens University of Economics and Business. Her research interests are in the fields of income distribution, poverty, social policy, and taxation. She is currently a member of the scientific personnel of the Council of Economic Advisors of the Greek Ministry of Finance, specializing in microdata analysis for the design of economic policies (mainly tax and benefit policies). She was previously employed as economic analyst at the Hellenic Competition Authority and participated in several research projects funded by national and international organizations.

Luis Beccaria obtained a bachelor’s degree in Economics at the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and a PhD in Economics at the University of Cambridge, England. He is Senior Research Officer at the National University of General Sarmiento (Argentina) and Professor of Labor Economics at the University of Buenos Aires. His main areas of research are labor economics, income distribution, and social policies. Formerly, he was Director of the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) of Argentina, Director of the Statistical Division of UN-ECLAC, and Head of the Research Unit of the National Development Bank. He has acted as a consultant to international organizations such as the ILO, UNICEF, IDB, and UNSD.

Olga Cantó holds a PhD in Economics at the European University Institute in Florence and is currently Associate Professor of Economic Theory at the Department of Economics of the Universidad de Alcalá. She has previously worked at the Department of Applied Economics of the Universidade de Vigo and as a Senior Researcher at the Instituto de Estudios Fiscales (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Finance). Her main research interests are the analysis of the dynamics of household income in developed countries, child poverty and the distributional impact of monetary public policies using microsimulation techniques. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, reports, and books.

Andrew E. Clark holds a PhD from the London School of Economics. He is currently a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Research Professor at the Paris School of Economics (PSE), and previously held posts at Dartmouth, Essex, CEPREMAP, DELTA, the OECD, and the University of Orléans. Andrew’s work has largely focused on the interface of psychology, sociology, and economics. In particular, his work focuses on using job and life satisfaction scores and other psychological indices as proxy measures of utility. One particular research question has been that of relative utility or comparisons (to others like you, to others in the same household, and to yourself in the past), finding evidence of such comparisons with respect to both income and unemployment. This work has spilled over into theoretical and empirical work on following behavior and learning from others’ actions. Recent work has involved collaboration with psychologists to map out habituation to life events (such as job loss, marriage, and divorce) using long-run panel data. In addition to his Paris position, he holds research associate positions at the London School of Economics, IZA (Bonn), Flinders University, and Kingston University. Andrew has published extensively in professional economics, sociology, and psychology journals and is a frequent presenter at professional meetings internationally. He is on the Editorial Board of ten journals, and has acted as referee for over 160 different journals across the Social Sciences.

Conchita D’Ambrosio is Professor of Economics at Université du Luxembourg. She is an economist, with a PhD from New York University (2000). Her research interests have revolved around the study of individual and social well-being and the proposal of various measures that are able to capture its different aspects. Two main points were stressed: Individual well-being depends on comparisons with a reference situation; Individual well-being depends both on one’s own life course and on the histories of others. Towards this aim, she has proposed a number of different indices, which have been axiomatically characterized. She has applied these to the study of different societies and analyzed their empirical links with subjective well-being, via their correlations with self-reported levels of satisfaction with income and life overall. She has published in Economica, Economics Letters, International Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Social Choice and Welfare, Review of Income and Wealth among other academic journals. She has been member of the editorial board of the Review of Income and Wealth since 2001 and editor of the same journal since 2007. She joined the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Inequality in 2013.

Manuel Espro holds a degree in Economics from the University of Buenos Aires. He is a research and teaching assistant at the National University of General Sarmiento (Argentina).

Taryn Ann Galloway <taryn.ann.galloway@ssb.no> has a PhD in Economics. She is a researcher at the Research Department, Statistics Norway. Her research covers poverty, income distribution, international migration and schooling.

Simone Ghislandi is Assistant Professor at the Department of Policy Analysis of Bocconi University. He is a member of both CERGAS (Health Economics) and DONDENA (Social dynamics) research centres at Bocconi. His research activity focuses on the quantitative analysis of health and well-being dynamics and on the regulation of the health industry. In 2008 he obtained a Dphil in Economics from the University of Oxford. His works have been published in a variety of economics, health economics, and policy journals.

Carlos Gradín (PhD in Economics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 1999) is Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Vigo in Galicia, Spain, and a member of the EQUALITAS network of researchers on income distribution. His main research interests are distributive issues such as poverty, inequality, mobility, or polarization, and gender and ethnic economics. His research has been published so far in journals such as the Review of Income and Wealth, Journal of Economic Inequality, Review of Household Economics, Regional Studies, Journal of African Economics, Industrial Relations, among others.

Björn Gustafsson <bjorn.gustafsson@socwork.gu.se> has a PhD in Economics and holds a position as professor at the Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany. His research covers empirical studies on poverty with special emphasis on China, distribution of economic well-being and the economics of immigration.

Andrew Heisz received his master’s degree in Economics from McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada) in 1992. After graduating, he took up a career with Statistics Canada where he has worked for more than 20 years as a researcher and survey manager. Andrew is presently Assistant Director of the Income Statistics Division of Statistics Canada. His responsibilities include the development and dissemination of income, wealth and pension statistics using census, survey and administrative data sources. Andrew is also responsible for the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA), a new statistical program that combines survey and administrative data with skills assessments to better understand the linkages between skills, work, and the family.

Markus Jäntti is Professor of Economics at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University. He was previously Research Director at the Luxembourg Income Study, Professor of Economics at Abo Akademi University and the University of Tampere, and Scientific Director at Statistics Finland. His research addresses inequality, poverty, and mobility, often in comparative perspective.

Stephan Klasen is Professor of Development Economics at the University of Göttingen. He is also the Director of the Ibero-America Institute for Economic Research and the Coordinator of the Courant Research Center “Poverty, equity, and growth in developing and transition countries.” He holds a PhD from Harvard University and has since held positions at the World Bank, King’s College (Cambridge, UK), and the University of Munich. His research focuses mostly on issues of poverty, inequality, environment, and gender. He is a member of the UN Committee on Development Policy, the European Development Research Network, and was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the 5th Assessment Report.

Roxana Maurizio is a Researcher at the National University of General Sarmiento (Argentina) and at the National Council for Science and Technology of Argentina. Roxana has a bachelor’s degree in Economics and a master’s degree in Economic Policy, both from the University of Buenos Aires. She holds a PhD in Economics from the National University of La Plata. Roxana has conducted research and participated as a consultant for national and international organizations such as the ILO, UNDP, ECLAC, UNICEF, and World Bank. She specializes in labor market issues and has published books and articles in national and international journals on labor economics, income distribution, employment, social policy, poverty, and the macroeconomics of employment and income.

Geranda Notten is Associate Professor in Comparative Public Policy. She specializes in poverty and social protection policy research and has been working on developed and developing countries including the European Union, United States, Russia, Congo Brazzaville, and more recently Canada. Geranda has been a visiting researcher at CEPS/INSTEAD (Luxembourg), the Kennedy School of Government (United States) and at the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance (the Netherlands). She further worked on consultancy projects for the World Bank, European Union and UNICEF on countries such as Mauritius, Congo Brazzaville, and Russia. Geranda holds a PhD in Economics from Maastricht University (the Netherlands).

Torun Österberg <torun.osterberg@socwork.gu.se> has a PhD in Economics. She is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research has focus on social policy, poverty, labor economics, and immigration.

Peder J. Pedersen <ppedersen@econ.au.dk> has a doctorate in Economics and is professor emeritus at Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University, Denmark and Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany. Currently, he is a research professor at SFI – Danish National Center for Social Research, Copenhagen. Main research interests are poverty and income distribution, labor economics, pensions and retirement, happiness research, and migration.

David O. Ruiz is a PhD student in Economics at the Universidad de Alcalá (Madrid, Spain) and Lecturer at the Department of Economics of the Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia). He has previously worked at the Universidad Javerina (Bogotá, Colombia) and at the Colombian Ministry of Commerce. His main research interests are labor economics and the distribution of income.

Eva M. Sierminska is the Head of the Graduate Studies Program at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Institute (LISER, formerly CEPS/INSTEAD). She is also a Research Fellow at IZA and Research Affiliate at DIW Berlin. She received her PhD in Economics from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. She worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Georgetown University, and Luxembourg Income Study. She has been a visiting researcher at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Board, DIW Berlin, IZA, INED in Paris, and Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin. She is a member of the ECB run Household Finance and Consumption Network (HFCN) and the OECD Expert Group on micro statistics on household, income, consumption, and wealth. Her current research interests include a broad range of topics in labor and population economics. Eva has published papers on cross-country and demographic differences in wealth portfolios, income and wealth distribution, measurement of inequality and well-being and methodological issues in cross-country wealth analysis, as well as employment and job market flows. She has also worked on labor force participation and welfare recipiency of the elderly and immigrants, and the differential effect of social benefits in an international context. Her recent studies concern differential wealth trajectories and the effect of wealth, risk, and other personality traits on labor market outcomes and well-being.

Jerry Situ received his master’s degree in Business Administration from Telfer School of Management (University of Ottawa) in 2009. He has been an analyst with the Government of Canada since 2003 where he has conducted research in various areas including post-secondary education, housing, and most recently, income statistics. Jerry is an assistant chief at Statistics Canada where he is responsible for the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults (LISA). He is currently on a temporary assignment with Health Canada.

Van Q. Tran earned a doctorate degree in Development Economics from University of Göttingen, Germany. He holds a post-doc position at University of Economics and Law, Vietnam National University. Van’s research covers household’s well-being, the dimensions of poverty, vulnerability to poverty, and development progress in developing countries.

Panos Tsakloglou is Professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business, Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Bonn) and Senior Research Fellow of the Hellenic Observatory (LSE, London). His research focuses on questions of inequality, poverty, social exclusion, returns to education, and social policy. He has published over 75 articles in scholarly journals and contributions to collective volumes and participated in over forty international and national research projects. He was Chairman of the Greek Government’s Council of Economic Advisors (2012–2014) and Head of the Prime Minister’s office on Labour and Social Policies (2010–2012).

Philippe Van Kerm holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Namur (Belgium). He is a researcher at CEPS/INSTEAD (now Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research, LISER) and has been since 2001. In 2012–2013, Philippe was scientific director ad interim at LISER. After which he served as a senior visiting researcher at the London School of Economics in 2013–2014. Philippe is now head of LISER’s Living Conditions department. He is a research associate at KU Leuven (Belgium) and ZEW Mannheim (Germany). His research interests center on the measurement and empirics of inequality, income distribution dynamics and social mobility, and on the microeconometrics of labour and welfare more generally.

Gustavo Vázquez is Research and Teaching Assistant at the National University of General Sarmiento (Argentina). He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires and a master’s degree in Econometrics from the Department of Economics, Torcuato Di Tella University.