Affiliates & Research Staff
Researchers associated with IRP consist of University of Wisconsin faculty members in the social sciences and a small number of social scientists at other institutions. Postdoctoral scholars and research scientists are also members of IRP.
There are about 75 formal affiliates representing a variety of disciplines, among them economics, sociology, social work, public policy, political science, human ecology (formerly family resources and consumer sciences), developmental psychology, educational policy studies, rural sociology, population health sciences, and law.
Affiliates enjoy a close relationship to IRP that gives them access to IRP editorial, publications, and computing services, and entitles them to apply for Institute financial support.
Alphabetical Listing of Affiliates
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
A
Scott W. Allard
Associate Professor of Social Service Administration
School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago
969 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-1131
sallard@uchicago.edu
- Inequality and poverty
- Institutional components of the safety net
- Federalism as it relates to antipoverty policy
Scott W. Allard’s research focuses on issues of inequality and poverty, the institutional
components of the safety net, and matters of federalism as they relate to antipoverty
policy. Recent work includes an examination of the transformation of the safety
net from cash-based to service-based forms of assistance, and the role that faith-based
and secular nonprofits play in delivering these new forms of assistance. Other
recent work includes analysis of the spatial relationships between poverty, program
participation, and opportunity, including several studies on the significant
spatial variation in access to public and nonprofit service providers in urban
America. Current ongoing projects include the study of faith-based service organizations,
rural poverty and social service provision, and assessment of the impact of service
accessibility on individual well-being.
Scott W. Allard's home page
A
Robert Asen
Associate Professor of Communication Arts
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6172 Vilas Hall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-4518
rbasen@wisc.edu
- Welfare policy debate
- Markets and public policy
- Social and economic inequality and public deliberation
Robert Asen's poverty-related research explores historical and contemporary
debates in institutional forums (i.e., congressional committee hearings, House
and Senate floor debates) regarding U.S. social welfare policy. A particular
focus of this research concerns the ways in which images of poor people
are constructed and enter into the public debate. Robert Asen is also interested
in the impact of social and economic inequalities on public deliberation, namely,
how such inequalities may exclude some citizens from debating public issues
and how these citizens seek to overcome such exclusions.
Robert Asen's home page
B
Judith Bartfeld
Professor of Consumer Science
School of Human Ecology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1300 Linden Drive, Room 336
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4765
bartfeld@wisc.edu
- Hunger and food insecurity
- Child support and low-income families
Judith Bartfeld's research interests are in the areas of food security and
child support policy. Current projects include an analysis of the effects
of state-level characteristics on hunger and food insecurity; a study focusing
on local differences in food insecurity among families of elementary school
children in Wisconsin; an assessment of the feasibility of using a self-administered
survey to measure food security; and research on child support arrears as
a barrier to subsequent child support payments. Bartfeld holds a joint appointment
with Cooperative Extension at the UW-Madison. She directs the Wisconsin Food
Security Project, an interactive web site providing county-level information
about food security, economic well-being, and the availability and use of
public and private programs to increase access to affordable food in Wisconsin.
Lawrence Berger
Assistant Professor of Social Work
School of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1350 University Avenue, Room 311
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-6332
lmberger@wisc.edu
- Child and family policy
- Child well-being
- Family resources and family structure
- Parenting, child maltreatment, and children's living arrangements
- Family leave policies
- Housing assistance policies
Lonnie Berger's research focuses on the ways in which economic resources, socio-demographic
characteristics, and public policies affect parental behaviors and child and
family well-being. His current projects are primarily concerned with: (1) exploring
relationships between income, family structure, parental work, parenting behaviors,
and children's care, development, and well-being; (2) examining the determinants
of "substandard" parenting, child maltreatment, and out-of-home placements
for children; (3) assessing the impacts of family leave on children's health
and well-being; and (4) exploring the effects of subsidized housing on behaviors
(e.g., labor supply) and well-being among low-income families.
Lonnie Berger's home page
Marianne N. Bloch
Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Women's Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
225 N. Mills Street
528B Teacher Education Building
Madison WI 53706
(608) 263-4673
bloch@education.wisc.edu
- Welfare reform and child care
- Child development and learning
- Ethnographic/qualitative research in community settings
Marianne Bloch's research has focused on historical and cross-cultural issues
related to early childhood education and child care in the United States, Africa,
and in East/Central Europe. Her interests include studies of women, work,
child care, and child care policy. Her latest research focuses on the
implications of welfare reform in Wisconsin on families, children, and child
care.
Karen Bogenschneider
Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Family Policy Specialist, University of Wisconsin-Extension
1430 Linden Drive, Room 201A
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4070
kpbogens@wisc.edu
- Family policy
- Connecting research to policy and practice
- Parenting of adolescents
- Adolescent substance use
Karen Bogenschneider has served as director of the Wisconsin Family Impact
Seminars since their inception in 1993. This project offers a series of seminars,
briefing reports, newsletters, and discussion sessions for state policymakers.
Of the 21 seminars held since 1993, about one fourth have dealt directly
with such poverty-related issues as welfare reform, child support, moving
families out of poverty, and helping poor children succeed. She also serves
as Executive Director of the Policy Institute for Family Impact Seminars,
which is providing technical assistance to 18 other states that are conducting
or planning to conduct seminars in their state capitols. Her writing on family
policy often highlights family poverty, drawing attention to how policies
and programs may influence a family's ability to provide economic support
for its members. Her research on adolescent development examines whether
processes fundamental to competent parenting by adolescents vary as a function
of educational level, ethnicity, or family structure. Her research on strategies
for bringing research to bear on policy and practice examines whether strategies
such as parent education newsletters and community coalition-building have
similar benefits for families who face few or multiple risks.
Kerry Bolger
Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1430 Linden Drive, Room 204
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-2381
kbolger@wisc.edu
- Social and emotional development
- Family and peer relationships
- Child maltreatment
Kerry Bolger's research focuses on parent-child relationships and the implications
of early adversity for children's social and emotional development. Her current
poverty-related projects include a longitudinal study of developmental risk
and resilience among maltreated children.
Tonya Brito
Professor of Law
University of Wisconsin-Madison
8103 Law Building
975 Bascom Mall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-6475
tlbrito@wisc.edu
- Family law, particularly issues relating to children
- Law and society
- Poverty law
Tonya Brito's home
page
William Brock
Vilas Research Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6430 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-6665
wbrock@ssc.wisc.edu
- Econometrics of policy evaluation and social interaction effects
- Economic growth and the environment
- Dynamics of human-dominated ecosystems
William A. Brock does research on robustification of policy analysis to model
uncertainty with applications to macroeconomic policy, growth policy, and management
of human-dominated ecosystems and well as econometric issues raised by measuring
social interactions effects.
William Brock's home
page
Meta Brown
Microeconomics and Regional Studies Function
Research and Statistics Group
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
33 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10005
(212) 720-5589
meta.brown@ny.frb.org
- End of life transfers and elder care
- Family structure and child outcomes
- Sources of long-term care for the disabled elderly
Meta Brown's research deals with transfers between parents and children, both
early and late in the life cycle of the family. Among older families, one question
is the extent to which the large amount of unpaid elder care observed in the
United States is compensated through planned end-of-life transfers. A current
project examines the division of parents' estates among siblings with competing
time demands and varying altruistic benefit from helping parents. Brown's research
on younger families focuses on the influence of family law on parents' investment
in children and attachment to families.
Meta Brown's home page
Patricia Brown
Senior Researcher, IRP
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6402 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-7770
brownp@ssc.wisc.edu
- Child support policy, especially in Wisconsin
- Administrative and survey data
Patricia Brown's primary interests are in the use of administrative
and survey data and research in the area of child support, including child
support guidelines, child custody, and shared physical placement.
Larry Bumpass
N. B. Ryder Professor of Sociology Emeritus
University of Wisconsin-Madison
2440 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-2182
bumpass@ssc.wisc.edu
- Family well-being
- Children's experiences and life-course development
- Cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing
- Family change in East Asia
Research by Larry Bumpass focuses on the social demography of the family, including
cohabitation, marriage, the stability of unions, contraception and fertility
(especially unmarried childbearing), and the implications of these processes
for children's living arrangements and subsequent life-course development. Over
the last ten years, this work has found particular focus in the design, execution,
and analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households, of which he
is co-director.
Larry
Bumpass's home page
C
Glen Cain
Emeritus Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7329 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-7897
cain@ssc.wisc.edu
- Labor markets and the labor force
- Evaluation research
Glen Cain is a member of the IRP Executive Committee. His current research interests
include assessing the effects of U.S. macroeconomic performance on the incidence
of poverty; a survey study of the work and well-being of W-2 welfare participants
in Milwaukee during two years after applying for welfare; and long-run changes
in the labor force composition and work time of the U.S. population, 1890 to
2000.
Maria Cancian
Professor of Public Affairs and Social Work
3436 Social Science Building
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-9037
cancian@lafollette.wisc.edu
- Welfare reform and evaluation
- Child support and family policy
- Economics of the family
- Distribution of income
Maria Cancian's research interests include poverty, welfare and child support
policy, and the economic well-being of families with children. She is Principal
Investigator, with Daniel Meyer, of the Child
Support Demonstration Evaluation in Wisconsin. Other areas of research include
the impact of married women's earnings on the distribution of income, the labor
supply effects of the EITC, and the relationship between changes in assortative
mating and changes in women's labor force participation.
Maria
Cancian's home page
Marcia J. Carlson
Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin–Madison
4458 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-1085
carlson@ssc.wisc.edu
- Child and family well-being and related public policy
- Father involvement
- Co-parenting
- Union formation and relationship quality among unmarried parent
Marcia (Marcy) Carlson’s primary research interests center on the links between family contexts and the well-being of children and parents, including implications for relevant public policies. Her most recent work is focused on father involvement, co-parenting, union formation, and couple relationship quality among unmarried parents—a demographic group at high risk of poverty. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology (demography) from the University of Michigan in 1999, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University (Center for Research on Child Wellbeing) from 1999 to 2001, and was an Assistant/Associate Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work from 2001 to 2008. Prior to graduate school, she worked for three years on social policy issues in Washington, DC.
Marcy
Carlson's home page
Emma Caspar
Researcher and Focus Editor, IRP
University of Wisconsin-Madison
3426 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-4168
ecaspar@ssc.wisc.edu
- Welfare reform and child support policy, with special emphasis on program
evaluation
Howard Chernick
Professor of Economics
Hunter College and the Graduate Center
City University of New York
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021-5024
(212) 772-5440
howard.chernick@hunter.cuny.edu
- Fiscal effects of block grants and matching grants for welfare programs
- Long-run tax incidence and economic mobility
- State and local tax incidence
- Fiscal capacity and metropolitan finance
- Welfare participation and earnings
Howard Chernick's current research includes:
- The construction of political-economic models to explain wide differences
across U.S. states in the progressivity of their tax systems and to examine
the relationship between progressivity and economic performance;
- Reestimation of the various welfare expenditure models to try to narrow the
range of uncertainty on the effect of matching grants and to improve our understanding
of the past fiscal interactions between Food Stamps, AFDC, Medicaid, and the
Earned Income Tax Credit. These interactions are intended to provide a fiscal
"baseline" for evaluation of the TANF programs.
- Welfare and earnings of low-income New Yorkers (with Cordelia Reimers, Hunter
College).
- International comparisons of the fiscal treatment of large cities (with Andrew
Reschovsky, UW-Madison).
Professor Chernick chairs the economics group in a study of the recovery of
New York City from the 9/11/01 terrorist attack, sponsored by the Russell Sage
foundation.
Howard
Chernick's home page
Poverty-related publications
J. Michael Collins
Assistant Professor of Consumer Science
School of Human Ecology
Department of Consumer Science
University of Wisconsin–Madison
1300 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-0369
jmcollins@wisc.edu
- Consumer behavior in financial markets
- Low-income working families
- The role of public policy in influencing credit, savings, and investment choices
Michael Collins's current research focuses on consumer responses to foreclosure,
the role of default counseling on loan repayment behavior, and the effects of
consumer protection policies on mortgage borrowers. He founded PolicyLab Consulting
Group, LLC, a consulting firm working primarily with national foundations and
nonprofits, and also co-founded MortgageKeeper Referral Services, a database
mortgage servicers and counselors use to refer distressed borrowers to social
services. He is also the lead researcher for several low-income tax preparation
programs evaluating strategies to encourage consumer saving at tax time.
J. Michael Collin's home page
Jane Collins
Evjue Bascom Professor of Rural Sociology and Gender & Women’s Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
312 Agricultural Hall
1450 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-1510
jcollins@ssc.wisc.edu
- Sociology of economic change and development
- Sociology of culture
- Gender
- Latin America
- Qualitative methods
Jane Collins has conducted ethnographic studies of work in the U.S. and Latin
America. She has studied family labor on small farms in Peru, women's work
in the agricultural export sector in Brazil and women's work in the globalizing
apparel industry in the U.S. and Mexico. In addition to studying the workplace
itself, her work focuses on home/work relations and household survival strategies
of very low-wage workers.
Jane Collins's home page
Jane Cooley
Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin–Madison
7440 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-9891
jcooley@ssc.wisc.edu
- Peer effects in education production
- Inequality in educational outcomes
Jane Cooley's research focuses on determining the effect of peers on
educational achievement in the U.S. and the resulting implications for
the optimal allocation of students to classrooms in the context of
competing objectives.
Jane Cooley's home page
Thomas Corbett
Senior Scientist Emeritus
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7401 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5843
corbett@ssc.wisc.edu
- Welfare reform
- Implementation research, especially at state and local levels
- Child support
Tom Corbett has emeritus status at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
and remains an active affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty
where, until his retirement, he served as Associate Director. He has long studied
trends in welfare reform and social programs that affect the well-being of
vulnerable families, along with methods for assessing their effectiveness and
monitoring the status of vulnerable populations. He served
on a National Academy of Sciences panel that examined methods for evaluating
contemporary welfare reform. Recently, he co-edited a book with Mary Clare
Lennon titled Policy
Into Action, an exploration of implementation-evaluation methods. He also
continues to examine and write on how social indicators can be used to shape
and understand emerging innovations in the design and management of social
assistance systems. Over the years, he has worked on welfare reform issues
at all levels of government, including a year as senior policy advisor at the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He continues to work with a number
of senior state welfare officials in the Midwest on various welfare reform
issues through the Welfare Peer Assistance Network (WELPAN), and consults with
several organizations attempting to help state and local sites successfully
introduce integrated service models.
Mark Courtney
Professor; Executive Director, Partners for Our Children; Ballmer Endowed Chair for Child Well-Being
School of Social Work
University of Washington
4101 15th Avenue, NE
Seattle, WA 98105-6299
(206) 221-3144
markec@u.washington.edu
- Child welfare services
- Foster care
- Welfare reform
Mark Courtney's research interests include the relationship between poverty
and the functioning of the child welfare services system. He is currently involved
in conducting two longitudinal studies of child welfare services. One is a comprehensive
evaluation of the Milwaukee County child welfare services system. The other
considers the post-discharge functioning of youth who turn 18 and thus leave
out-of-home care in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Professor Courtney is also
studying the potential impact of welfare reform in Milwaukee on the well-being
of children and their involvement with child welfare services.
Mark Courtney's
home page
Katherine J. Curtis
Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
350 Agricultural Hall
1450 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 890-1900
kcurtis@ssc.wisc.edu
- Racial and gender inequality among participants of the Great Migration
- Racial inequality in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico
- U.S. poverty and racial inequality in the South, 1970-2000
Katherine Curtis’s research investigates the relationship between economic
transitions, demographic responses, and emerging or persisting systems of stratification.
She utilizes an array of quantitative methodology in her research, including
spatial data analysis, multilevel modeling, and various forms of regression
analysis. Three current research projects are: (1) an examination of the spatial
distribution of poverty during the 20th century in an effort to understand
the historical process underlying contemporary patterns of persistent poverty;
(2) an extension of her earlier work on the Great Migration, which examines
the social and economic consequences of the Great Migration which resulted
in the redistribution of the U.S. southern population, and the return migration
that also has dramatically altered the demographic and social landscape of
the U.S.; and (3) demographic change and inequality in early twentieth-century
Puerto Rico
Katherine Curtis’s
home page
D
Sandra K. Danziger
Professor of Social Work and Public Policy
University of Michigan
School of Social Work
1080 S. University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106
(734) 615-4648
sandrakd@umich.edu
- Welfare reform implementation
- Barriers to employment of low-income single mothers
- Well-being effects of services and policies for low-income families and
children
Sandra K. Danziger's primary research interests are the effects of public programs
on the well-being of families and children. More broadly, she focuses on poverty,
demographic trends in child and family well-being, program implementation and
evaluation, and qualitative research methods. Professor Danziger's current projects
address the implementation of welfare reform policies and their impacts for
low-income families and children. She is a Principal Investigator on the Women's
Employment Study and the From Welfare to Jobs and Independence project.
Sandra Danziger's
home page
Martin David
Emeritus Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Contact:
2603 Middleton Beach Road
Middleton, WI 53562
(608) 238-2181
david@ssc.wisc.edu
- Income and wealth--assets, net worth, intergenerational transmission
- SIPP methodology
Martin David is investigating correction of models and food stamp participation
for response error. That research shows correlation of false reports to
later attrition in the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation.
Current work extends the analysis to problems of reporting in multiple
program use, and multiple reports of food stamps. In 1996, Professor David
developed a template for thinking about using administrative data to evaluate
welfare reform. That work is reported in IRP Special Report #69 and "Monitoring
Income for Social and Economic Development," in Empirische Forschung
und Wirtschaftspolitische Beratung, ed. H. Galler and G. Wagner (Frankfurt/New
York: Campus).
Aimée Dechter
Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4454 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4896
dechter@ssc.wisc.edu
- Interrelationships of family structure, gender roles, work and economic well-being
- Socioeconomic and racial disparities in health
Aimée Dechter is interested in the nature and implications of marriage and cohabitation.
She studies differences across family structure in work, economic well-being,
and relationship quality and stability. Her current research includes an examination
of the processes that generate a marriage premium in wages, including gender
roles within the family. She is also interested in socioeconomic and ethnic disparities
in health care and health. She is currently investigating the association between
service and physical environments, and socioeconomic and racial differentials
in mortality.
Aimée Dechter's home
page
Thomas DeLeire
Associate Professor of Public Affairs and Population Health
University of Wisconsin–Madison
209 Observatory Hill Office Building
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4531
tdeleire@lafollette.wisc.edu
- economic mobility
- family structure
Thomas DeLeire's research focuses on labor and health economics. His recent work is on economic mobility, family structure, choice of occupation, health insurance spending, and the well-being of poor households. In other work, he has examined the impact of overtime regulations on hours of work, the effect of the Americans with Disabilities Act on the employment of disabled citizens, the extent to which disabled workers face wage discrimination by employers, and the role that tax-favored savings accounts play in increasing national savings.
Thomas DeLeire's home page
Stacy A. Dickert-Conlin
Associate Professor of Economics
Michigan State University
110 Marshall-Adams Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824-1038
(517) 353-7275
dickertc@msu.edu
- Tax policy
- Family structure
Stacy Dickert-Conlin received her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Professor Dickert-Conlin's research focuses on the effect of taxes and welfare
programs on family structure and labor supply decisions. She is particularly
interested in whether financial incentives implicit in the welfare, income
tax, and Social Security systems discourage or encourage, marriage, cohabitation,
and fertility.
Stacy Dickert-Conlin's
home page
Robin Douthitt
Dean of the School of Human Ecology and Bascom Professor of Consumer Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1300 Linden Drive, Room 141
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4847
douthitt@wisc.edu
- Consumer information and risk analysis
- Consumer expenditure studies
- Value of unpaid work in national income accounts: Satellite accounting
Robin Douthitt is Dean of the School of Human Ecology. She is also developing
a model to calculate satellite measures of Gross Domestic Product that includes
unpaid work. Ultimately, she will analyze the consequence for income distribution
of including that measure in GDP. Her most recent work is in the area of mothers'
health awareness and its impact on children's diets. She is the founder of the
Women Faculty Mentoring Program at the UW-Madison.
Laura Dresser
Associate Director
Center on Wisconsin Strategy
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7122 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6944
ldresser@ssc.wisc.edu
- Low-wage labor market and work restructuring
- Workforce development systems
- Wisconsin labor markets
Laura Dresser has conducted research on urban labor markets, low-wage jobs,
economic restructuring and its effects on low-wage workers, and workforce development
policy in the United States. She has also actively worked to develop program
and policy solutions to issues in low-wage labor markets. In Milwaukee, she
has had a central design and implementation role in the development of the Milwaukee
Jobs Initiative where labor, community, and business partners work to improve
job access and advancement for central city workers. She has worked with the
U.S. AFL-CIO to document labor's contribution to training and education systems
in emerging High Road Regional Partnerships. Central in her current research
interests is a focus on the dynamics of low-wage service sector work and on
policy solutions to improve outcomes for workers in those industries.
Laura Dresser's
home page
Mitchell Duneier
Professor of Sociology
Princeton University
155 Wallace Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544
(609) 258-8040
mduneier@princeton.edu
- Social ethnography
- Longitudinal field research
Mitchell Duneier is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. His research
interests include social interaction, poverty, inequality, and urban sociology.
He is the author of two urban ethnographies: Sidewalk (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1999) and Slim's Table (University of Chicago
Press, 1992). Sidewalk received the 2000 C. Wright Mills Award of the
Society for the Study of Social Problems. The 4th edition of Introduction
to Sociology (with Anthony Giddens and Richard P. Appelbaum) was published
in 2003.
Mitchell
Duneier's home page
Steven Neil Durlauf
Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7464 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-3859
sdurlauf@ssc.wisc.edu
- Social interaction effects
- Intergenerational income mobility
Steven N. Durlauf is a former Director of the Economics Program at the Santa
Fe Institute and is currently affiliated with the Center on Social and Economic
Dynamics of the Brookings Institution, the Center for Demography and Ecology
at UW-Madison, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Durlauf is also
codirector of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network
on Social Interactions and Economic Outcomes. His primary research interests
include income inequality, economic growth, and econometrics. His current research
focuses on issues related to the role of social influences in explaining poverty
as well as on developing techniques to facilitate the better use of statistical
analyses in evaluating alternative government policies.
Steven Durlauf's home page
E
Peter Eisinger
Henry Cohen Professor
Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy
New School University
72 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
(212) 229-5400
eisingep@newschool.edu
- Urban politics and policy
- State and local economic development
- State politics
- Federalism
Peter Eisinger has two major current research projects: a study of how emergency
food programs (food pantries and soup kitchens) have dealt with the increased
burden generated by tightening of food stamp eligibility and benefits brought
about by the 1996 welfare reform (covered in depth in Focus,
Vol. 20:3, p.23). The other project is a study of the takeover of
the Detroit school system by the mayor, an initiative of the governor and state
legislature. The mayor-appointed school board replaced the elected board
and hired a CEO and gave him a strong mandate to effect changes. Professor
Eisinger is currently tracking these efforts and setting them against education
reform initiatives in other places.
Peter
Eisinger's home page
F
Christopher J. Flinn
Professor of Economics
New York University
19 W 4th Street, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10012-1119
(212) 998-8925
christopher.flinn@nyu.edu
- Job mobility and unemployment
- Formation and dissolution of households
- Child support decisions
- Cohort size effects on labor market outcomes
Christopher Flinn's primary research interests lie in two areas:
dynamic labor market analysis and family economics, especially with regard
to the behavior of divorced parents. His research on labor market dynamics
is centered on the theoretical and empirical analysis of unemployment,
job mobility, and wage growth. His research in family economics (much of
it done in collaboration with Daniela Del Boca) has focused on the effects
of child support orders on child support transfers and the welfare of nonintact
family members. In conducting empirical work on this topic, he has extensively
utilized the Wisconsin Court Records Database, which is housed at the IRP.
His current research projects include a theoretical and empirical analysis
of the effect of minimum wages on labor market outcomes and an investigation
of the effects of the institutional environment on the formation and dissolution
of households.
Christopher Flinn's home page
G
Adam Gamoran
Professor of Sociology and Educational Policy Studies
Director, Wisconsin Center
for Education Research
University of Wisconsin-Madison
785C Educational Science Building
1025 W. Johnson Street
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-2704
gamoran@ssc.wisc.edu
- Educational policy
- Stratification in school systems
- School reforms and inequality
Adam Gamoran's research focuses on stratification and inequality in school systems.
His current work includes two studies of school racial composition. One uses
two national longitudinal surveys to examine the consequences of high school
racial composition for labor market outcomes, eight to ten years after high
school. The other, in collaboration with colleagues at Vanderbilt University,
is a study of the re-segregation of the Nashville schools following the end
of court-ordered desegregation. Student achievement data from before, during,
and after changes in school assignment policies shed new light on the relation
between school composition and student outcomes, and the potential for school
resources to mitigate the challenges of teaching high concentrations of disadvantaged
minority children. Other work focuses on stratification and inequality in higher
education, past and future trends in racial inequality in American education,
and the organizational context of school reform.
His research includes a study, with Robert D. Mare, of the impact of early
childhood education on cognitive growth among children from different family
backgrounds. Other current projects examine the relation between organizational
resources and teaching practices in schools, and the impact of classroom instruction
on levels and inequality of achievement in middle and high school English.
Gamoran has written much about the effects of tracking and ability grouping
on student achievement, focusing especially on the quality and quantity of
academic instruction that occurs in different groups and tracks.
Standards-Based
Reform and the Poverty Gap, a volume edited by Adam Gamoran
and based on the 2006 IRP-WCER-UW–Madison School of Education conference
Will Standards-Based Reform in Education Help Close the Poverty Gap?
Adam Gamoran's
home page
Markus Gangl
Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4456 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-9856
mgangl@ssc.wisc.edu
- Social stratification, with a particular focus on analyses of labor
markets, unemployment, poverty, and income inequality
- The social consequences of economic inequality
- Relationship between educational policies and educational inequality in Western societies
Markus Gangl’s research interests are mainly in social stratification, with
a focus on quantitative, cross-nationally comparative, and longitudinal analyses
of labor markets, unemployment, poverty, and income inequality. In the past,
he has worked extensively on unemployment incidence and unemployment duration
in the U.S. and Germany, as well as on the relationship between labor market
and welfare policies on longer-term scar effects of job loss in Western European
countries and the U.S. New work extends his focus to the social consequences
of economic inequality and the relationship between educational policies and
educational inequality in Western societies.
Markus Gangl’s
home page
Irwin Garfinkel
Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems in Social Work
Columbia University
1255 Amsterdam Avenue, Room 714
New York, NY 10027-5927
(212) 851-2383
ig3@columbia.edu
- Child support and nonresident fathers
- Social welfare policy
- Income maintenance and labor supply
Irwin Garfinkel was Director of the IRP from 1975 to 1980. His earlier research
into child support issues has been instrumental in legislative enactment of
child support reforms. His recent research examines the effects of child support
reforms on child support payments, behaviors of resident and nonresident parents,
and ultimately on child well-being. Recently, his work has focused more on nonresident
fathers--their economic and social circumstances and the effects of child support
reforms on their behavior. He is currently a co-principal investigator of the
Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study, a longitudinal survey of new (mostly
unwed) parents and their children in 21 U.S. cities.
Irwin
Garfinkel's home page
Sara Goldrick-Rab
Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology
University of Wisconsin–Madison
575K Educational Science Building
1025 W. Johnson Street
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-2141
srab@education.wisc.edu
- Policies affecting college access and persistence for disadvantaged
populations
- Workforce development
- Community colleges and career pathways
Sara Goldrick-Rab's research is in the area of higher education policy.
She was recently awarded a 2006–2007 National Academy of
Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellowship and was named a
2004 Rising Scholar by the National Forum on Higher Education for the
Public Good. Her research has been published in Sociology
of Education,
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and Teachers
College Record,
and she is the co-author of Putting Poor People to Work, published by
the Russell Sage Foundation in 2006. She is currently conducting a study
on the college mobility patterns of Chicago public school students and
is collaborating with several IRP affiliates on an examination of access
and equity at UW–Madison. Other projects include an analysis of
inequality in postsecondary transitions, an assessment of how high
school coursework affects delay in the transition to college, and a
study of state variation in community college growth over time. She
teaches courses on higher education policy, community colleges,
sociology of education, and gender and higher education. Dr.
Goldrick-Rab is a faculty affiliate of the Wisconsin Center for the
Advancement of Postsecondary Education and an affiliated primary investigator
at the Consortium for Chicago School Research.
Sara Goldrick-Rab's home page
Linda Gordon
Vilas Professor Emerita of History
New York University
53 Washington Square, S
New York, NY 10012
(212) 998-8627
linda.gordon@nyu.edu
- History of the welfare state
- Family violence
- Single motherhood
- Abortion and birth control
Peter Gottschalk
Professor of Economics
Boston College
448 Administration Building
21 Campanella Way
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3859
(617) 552-4517
Peter.Gottschalk@bc.edu
- Trends in poverty
- Trends in earnings inequality
- Welfare duration
- Welfare participation across generations
Peter Gottschalk's poverty-related research has focused on three issues: 1.
Changes in earnings inequality and poverty. This work (joint with Sheldon Danziger)
examines changes in earnings and family income inequality in the United States
and in other industrialized countries. 2. Work dynamics among low-wage workers.
His recent research (joint with Helen Connolly) on work dynamics has focused
on earnings growth while on a job and between jobs. 3. Data quality. One branch
of this work ( joint with Minh Huynh) examines the reliability of SIPP earnings
data. Another branch develops a technique for identifying and eliminating measurement
error.
Peter Gottschalk's home page
Gary Paul Green
Professor of Rural Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
346D Agricultural Hall
1450 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-2710
gpgreen@wisc.edu
- Job training
- Regional development
Gary Green's research and teaching focuses primarily on community and economic
development. He is currently involved in two projects related to poverty and
low-income workers. The first project examines the role of employers, community
colleges, and community-based organizations in providing job training in rural
areas. He is especially interested in the constraints that employers face in
providing general training and the effectiveness of community-based organizations
in overcoming these obstacles. Second, he is examining the relationship between
amenities and development in rural areas. He is interested in understanding
the effects of amenity-led development on poverty and income inequality in these
regions and the effectiveness of local strategies to balance the preservation
of amenities and the promotion of growth.
Gary Green's
home page
David Greenberg
Emeritus Professor of Economics
University of Maryland-Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250-0002
(410) 455-2160
dhgreenb@umbc.edu
- Evaluation of welfare, employment and training programs
- Social experimentation and public policy
- Labor supply and welfare reform
Much of David Greenberg's research focuses on the evaluation of government
programs that are targeted at the low-income population, especially public
assistance, employment, and training programs. He has coauthored a textbook
on cost-benefit analysis, a technique that can be used to help assess the
effectiveness of government programs. He has coauthored the Digest of
Social Experiments (Urban
Institute Press), a reference book that provides summary information on all
previous and on-going social experiments.
Poverty-related publications
David Grusky
Professor of Sociology
Stanford University
Building 120, Room 210
450 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-2047
(650) 725-9150
grusky@stanford.edu
- Social class
- Intergenerational social mobility
- Gender inequality
David B. Grusky is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, incoming
Director of the Program on Social Inequality at Stanford University, and
coeditor (with Paula England) of the Stanford University Press Social Inequality
Series. He is currently studying the underlying contours of social mobility
and sex segregation, the structure of racial and cross-national variability
in social mobility and sex segregation, the rise and fall of social classes
under advanced industrialism, the sources of modern attitudes toward gender
inequality, and long-term trends in patterns of occupational and geographic
mobility. His recent books are Social Stratification:
Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective (2nd edition), Poverty
and Inequality (coedited
with Ravi Kanbur), Mobility and Inequality (coedited with Stephen
Morgan & Gary
Fields), and Occupational Ghettos (coauthored with Maria Charles).
David Grusky's home
page
H
John C. Ham
Professor of Economics
University of Maryland
3105 Tydings Hall
College Park, MD 20742
(301) 405-3497
ham@econ.umd.edu
- The duration of employment and non-employment of disadvantaged women, and how they are affected by manpower training programs
- Children’s take-up of private and public health insurance, and movements between private, public and no-insurance coverage for children
- Effects of welfare reform on health insurance status of disadvantaged women
- Methods of evaluating take-up of social programs such as Medicaid
- Gender differences in laboratory experiments concerning strategic behavior
- Evaluation of medical interventions in a quasi-experimental setting
- The effect of state enterprise zone and federal empowerment zone designation on disadvantaged labor markets
John C. Ham’s research is in the areas of applied microeconomics, labor economics,
health economics, experimental economics and econometrics. He has looked at
the effect of different Manpower Training programs such as NSW and JTPA on
the duration of employment and the duration of nonemployment of disadvantaged
women. He has also addressed issues that come up in the policy evaluation of
labor market programs using duration models. Ham has examined static and dynamic
linear regression models of children’s health insurance take-up across private
and public health insurance resulting from expansions in public coverage such
as SCHIP. Current research includes: (i) an examination of the addictive nature
of eating disorder behavior among young women; (ii) a quasi-experimental evaluation
of the Kids ‘n’ Fitness program implemented in four California schools (which
involves both primary school children and their parents in nutrition counseling
and the children in a regular exercise program); (iii) the employment dynamics
of the mothers, and the health insurance status of the mothers and their children,
post-welfare reform; and (iv) a non-experimental evaluation of the effect of
state enterprise zone and federal empowerment zone designation on disadvantaged
labor markets.
John Ham's home page
Michael J. Handel
Associate Professor of Sociology
Northeastern University
500 Holmes Hall
Boston, MA 02115-4996
(617) 373-3620
m.handel@neu.edu
- Labor markets and wage inequality
- Job skill requirements
- Information technology and the changing nature of work and organizations
Michael Handel is Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University.
He studies the growth of wage inequality in the last twenty years and its
relationship to job skill requirements and changes in technology and organizational
structure and practice. His current research focuses on whether the diffusion
of computer use at work and the increased use of high performance work practices
has resulted in a mismatch between the skills employers demand and workers
possess.
Michael Handel's home page
Poverty-related publications
Douglas N. Harris
Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies
University of Wisconsin–Madison
575J Education Science Building
1025 W. Johnson Street
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4406
dnharris3@wisc.edu
- Academic achievement gaps between racial and income groups
- Desegregation, accountability, and other policies affecting educational inequality
- Educational influence of school and non-school resources
Douglas Harris is an economist whose poverty-related research focuses on how educational policies have influenced educational inequality over the past half-century. His most recent work focuses on how student learning is influenced by policies such as racial desegregation, school finance, accountability, standards, and school choice. He is also engaged in various projects involving how teachers influence student learning, including the influence of teacher preparation, experience, and National Board Certification.
Douglas Harris's home page
Robert M. Hauser
Vilas Research Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4430 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4715
hauser@ssc.wisc.edu
- Socioeconomic achievement across the life course
- Educational and social mobility across generations
- Aging and inequality in health and well-being
- Measurement, causes, and consequences of cognitive functioning
- Poverty measurement
- Federal statistical system
- Director, Wisconsin Longitudinal Study
Robert M. Hauser was Director of IRP from 1991 to 1994. He is currently director
of the Center for Demography of Health and Aging. He is principal investigator
of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a long-term survey of a cohort of 10,000
men and women who graduated from Wisconsin high schools in 1957. The WLS
began as a study of the transition from high school to college or the work force.
It has become a multidisciplinary study of the life course and aging. A new
wave of WLS surveys is being conducted in 2003-2004. In recent years, Hauser
has combined work on the WLS with studies of trends and differentials in educational
attainment and of the role of achievement testing in American society.
Robert Hauser's home page
Robert Haveman
John Bascom Professor of Economics and Public Affairs Emeritus
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7325 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-7398
haveman@lafollette.wisc.edu
- Determinants of living arrangements of young adults
- Trends in the level and use of human capital
- Effects of BadgerCare on health insurance coverage and labor market performance
- The adequacy of savings among retired and disabled workers
Robert Haveman was Director of the IRP from 1971 to 1975 and Director of the
La Follette Institute of Public Affairs from 1988 to 1991. He served as Chair
of the Economics Department, and is a member of the IRP Executive Committee.
With Barbara Wolfe, he has published a monograph on the determinants of the
economic success of young adults. The book, Succeeding Generations: On the
Effects of Investments in Children (Russell Sage Foundation, 1994), explores
the impacts of family economic status, family structure, and demographic factors
on the education, fertility, and labor force success of the individuals. He
is also undertaking research on the measurement of poverty, utilizing the concept
of earnings capacity rather than reported cash income. In recent work, he studied
the relationship between the economic performance of the nation and the poverty
rate; he demonstrated that although prosperity during the 1970s and 1980s seemed
to have little effect on the poverty rate, the experience of the 1990s indicates
that the rising economic tide also lifts the boats of the poor. In his most
recent book, The Level and Utilization of Human Capital in the U. S.: 1975-2000,
with Andrew Bershadker and Jon Schwabish (Upjohn Institute, 2003), uses the
earnings capacity concept to track changes in the level and use of the nation's
human capital over the past three decades, with attention to these patterns
among vulnerable groups.
Robert
Haveman's home page
Carolyn Heinrich
Professor of Public Affairs
Director, Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs
IRP Associate Director of Research and Training
La Follette School of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5443
cheinrich@lafollette.wisc.edu
- Labor policy and welfare-to-work
- Social program evaluation
- Policy impacts on families
Carolyn Heinrich is the director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs,
professor of public affairs and affiliated professor of economics, a Regina
Loughlin Scholar, and the associate director of research and training at the
Institute for Research on Poverty. Her research focuses on social welfare policy,
public management, and econometric methods for social-program evaluation. She
also works directly in her research with governments at all levels, including
with the federal government on an evaluation of workforce development programs,
the state of Wisconsin on a child-support demonstration program, Milwaukee
Public Schools in the evaluation of supplemental educational services, and
the governments of Brazil and South Africa on their social and human capital
development programs. Other ongoing projects involve the study of labor market
intermediaries and labor market outcomes for low-skilled and disadvantaged
workers, policy factors that support effective provision of substance abuse
treatment services, and the use and impacts of social investment funds in developing
countries. Heinrich is co-author of several books on the empirical study of
governance and public management, including Improving Governance: A New
Logic for Empirical Research (with Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., and Carolyn
J. Hill) and Governance and Performance: New Perspectives (with Laurence
E. Lynn, Jr.).
Carolyn
Heinrich's home page
Pamela Herd
Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
3454 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-9451
pherd@lafollette.wisc.edu
- Old age policy
- Health
- Gender, race, and class inequality
Pamela Herd's research is in the areas of the welfare state and health.
Her research on the welfare state focuses on how social policies shape
gender, race, and class inequality. Her research on health explores how
social factors, particularly socioeconomic status, shape disease
processes, physical functioning, and mortality.
Pamela
Herd's home page
John Hoffmire
Director, Center on Business and Poverty
University of Wisconsin-Madison
University Research Park Innovation Center
510 Charmany Drive - Box 178
Madison, WI 53719-1235
(608) 345-5111
hoffmire@wisc.edu
The Director of the Center on Business and Poverty is Dr. John S. Hoffmire, who has had a twenty-year career in equity investing, venture capital, consulting and investment banking. Dr. Hoffmire's research and work have had a particular focus on employee stock ownership plans (ESOP). As founder and CEO of his own investment banking firm, Dr. Hoffmire helped employees buy and manage approximately $1.6 billion worth of ESOP stock. He sold his firm to American Capital, which then went public. Dr. Hoffmire left American Capital as Senior Investment Officer when the company reached $1 billion in assets. Dr. Hoffmire was vice president at Ampersand Ventures, formerly Paine Webber's private equity group. After he finished his Ph.D. at Stanford University, Dr. Hoffmire was a consultant at Bain & Company.
Center on Business and Poverty's home page
Karen Holden
Professor of Public Affairs and Consumer Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1300 Linden Drive, Room 370C
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-9283
holden@lafollette.wisc.edu
- Economic status of the elderly
- Disability and mental health
- Women, pensions, and social security
- Program evaluation
Karen Holden's research is on the economic well-being of the elderly
and disabled. Her work examines how social security and private pension
provisions influence retirement timing and well-being after retirement
and widowhood.
Karen
Holden's home page
Robinson G. Hollister, Jr.
Joseph Wharton Professor of Economics
Swarthmore College
Kohlberg Hall
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore, PA 19081-1306
(610) 328-8105
rhollis1@swarthmore.edu
- Evaluation methodology
- Employment and training programs
- Labor market policy
Robinson G. Hollister, Jr., has an extensive record in poverty-related
research: he served on the staff of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity
at the time that the Institute for Research on Poverty was established,
in 1966, and was in residence at the Institute from 1967 to 1970, working
on the income maintenance experiments. His present research interests include
analysis of the potential for earnings subsidies, community economic development,
particularly community development financial institutions, and the evaluation
of welfare reform.
Harry Holzer
Professor of Public Policy
Georgetown Public Policy Institute
Georgetown University
3520 Prospect Street, NW, Suite 400
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 687-1458
hjh4@georgetown.edu
- Low-income workers and job availability
- Minority youth unemployment
- Employer wage-setting and hiring behavior
Harry J. Holzer's research interests include minority youth employment, welfare-to-work,
discrimination and Affirmative Action, and the effects of employer hiring behaviors
in the low-wage labor market more broadly. His recent books include What
Employers Want: Job Prospects for Less-Educated Workers (Russell Sage Foundation,
1996) and Employers and Welfare Recipients: The Effects of Welfare Reform
in the Workplace (with Michael Stoll, Public Policy Institute of California,
2000). Holzer is also a Visiting Fellow at the Urban Institute.
Harry
Holzer's home page
Poverty-related publications
V. Joseph Hotz
Professor of Economics
Duke University
220B Social Sciences Building
P.O. Box 90097
Durham, NC 27708-0097
(919) 660-1841
hotz@econ.duke.edu
- Labor economics
- Economic demography
- Evaluation of the impact of social programs
- Applied econometrics
V. Joseph Hotz (Ph.D., Economics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1980) is
Chair of the Department of Economics at UCLA. Hotz also serves as the Principal
Investigator for the California Census Research Data Center and chair of the
Center's Statewide Oversight Board. Hotz has published extensively in the areas
of the economics of the family, applied econometrics and the evaluation of social
programs. His published articles examine the relationship between the labor
force participation and childbearing patterns of married women in the United
States and Sweden. He also has written on methods for assessing the impacts
of job training programs authorized by the Job Training Partnership Act and
in other contexts. His recent work focuses on game-theoretic models of relationships
between parents and children; analyses of the consequences of teenage childbearing;
the effects of child care regulations on the choices of parents; the effects
of maternal labor supply and child care arrangements on accidents among children,
the returns to early work experiences among youth in the United States; and
the impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit, AFDC, and Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families programs on low-income populations in California during the
1990s.
V. Joseph Hotz's home page
Hilary Hoynes
Professor of Economics
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616-8578
(530) 752-3226
hwhoynes@ucdavis.edu
- Analysis of administrative data on welfare, earnings, and health care
- Welfare benefits, marriage, and fertility decisions
Hilary Hoynes's research centers on the analysis of the effects of public assistance
programs on individual behavior. In "The EITC and Labor Supply: Married Couples,"
Hoynes examines the effect of the EITC on the labor force participation and
hours of work decisions of married couples. She finds that expansions in the
EITC over the last decade have led to some increase in labor supply by husbands,
but no significant changes for wives. She also finds evidence that the high
tax rates in the phase-out range of the credit could lead to large reductions
in hours of work for those eligible for the credit. In "Local Labor Markets
and Welfare Spells: Do Demand Conditions Matter?", Hoynes finds that in areas
with better and improving labor market conditions the length of time on welfare
is lower. In related work, she finds that entry rates in AFDC are also counter-cyclical,
in that more persons enter welfare during economic downturns than in labor market
expansions. In "Do Welfare Benefits Play a Role in Female Headship Decisions?"
she analyzes how welfare benefits affect marriage and fertility decisions, finding
that within-state variation in welfare benefits is not associated with changes
in the headship rate. Much of Hoynes's future work centers on developing and
using administrative data recently made available in California. These data
allow one to link up welfare utilization data with quarterly earnings data and
health care utilization data.
Hilary Hoynes's home
page
Poverty-related publications
J
Rucker Johnson
Assistant Professor of Public Policy
University of California, Berkeley
Goldman School of Public Policy
2607 Hearst Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94720-7320
(510) 643-0169
ruckerj@berkeley.edu
Rucker Johnson's work focuses on the economics of disadvantage and is organized around three broad themes. The first concerns the extent to which residential segregation patterns (by race and income) contribute to economic and racial differences in employment outcomes, wealth accumulation, and health outcomes. The second seeks to identify sources of current health disparities. The third is a separate line of research in which he investigates the effects of the welfare policy reforms of the 1990s using broader measures of well-being, beyond earnings and caseload declines, to examine effects of job transition patterns on housing and neighborhood quality, and child well-being.
Johnson is studying the intersection of labor markets, spatial features of the urban economy, and socioeconomic determinants of health and health disparities over the life cycle. The emphasis on issues of poverty and inequality is the common thread of this research. His research in labor economics has focused on the less-skilled labor market; his research in urban economics has been concerned with the concentration of the poor and its effects on the structure of opportunity; and his research in health centers on understanding underlying processes that produce health disparities over the life course. The intersection of these provides a rich set of research questions with significant policy relevance.
Rucker Johnson's home page
K
Thomas Kaplan
IRP Associate Director of Programs and Management and Senior Scientist
University of Wisconsin-Madison
3444 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-0345
kaplan@ssc.wisc.edu
- Implementation research
- Evaluation research
- Wisconsin welfare and health care reforms
Tom Kaplan's research interests are in welfare reform and child support
policy and evaluation, with special emphasis on program management and
Wisconsin state government programs, and the history of health and social
welfare programs.
John Kennan
Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6434 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5393
jkennan@ssc.wisc.edu
- Bargaining
- Migration
- Monetary exchange with private information
John Kennan's home
page
Poverty-related publications
L
Rasmus Lentz
Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6440 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5373
rlentz@ssc.wisc.edu
- Labor productivity growth
- Worker reallocation
Rasmus Lentz's current research focuses on the contribution of labor reallocation
to aggregate productivity growth. In particular, an explicit modeling that
links labor market performance to aggregate productivity growth will allow
a better understanding of the impact of labor market policies such as minimum
wage legislation and employment protection on aggregate welfare. The research
uses matched employer-employee data merged with detailed firm data to quantify
the importance of worker reallocation in the economic growth process. Currently
the data are from Denmark, but future work will include work on U.S. data.
Another line of work studies the link between self-insurance against income
loss through savings and government-provided unemployment insurance. The work
uses Danish unemployment duration data linked with a rich set of individual
characteristics such as wealth holdings.
Rasmus Lentz's home page
John Allen Logan
Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4438 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-0995
logan@ssc.wisc.edu
- Social mobility
- Computationally intensive estimation methods
- Systemic opportunity constraints
John Allen Logan's research focuses on social mobility and stratification
in general, and actor-oriented models of employment and marriage in particular.
John Allen Logan's home page
M
Timothy D. McBride
Professor of Social Work
Institute for Public Health
Washington University in St. Louis
242 Goldfarb Hall, Campus Box 1196
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130
(314) 935-4356
tmcbride@wustl.edu
- Health economics
- Elderly and disabled
Timothy D. McBride's primary research interests are in public economics,
with special emphasis on the economics of health and aging. He has examined
issues such as the number of people without health insurance and their
duration without insurance, the demand for nursing homes and long-term
care, the retirement behavior of the elderly, and projections of the economic
needs and demographics of the elderly in the 21st century. Several of these
studies have focused on the poverty population, especially their access
to health insurance and health care, including long-term care. Professor
McBride is currently working on analyses of the following subjects: the
market for Medicare managed care, proposals to restructure Medicare, the
duration of uninsured spells for children and the poor, and the impacts
of health insurance mandates on the incomes of low-wage workers.
Tim McBride's home page
Sara McLanahan
Professor of Sociology
Office of Population Research
Center for Research on Child Well-Being
Princeton University
265 Wallace Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544
(609) 258-4875
mclanaha@princeton.edu
- Family structure and the intergenerational transmission of poverty
- Single motherhood
- Effect of divorce on women and children
Sara McLanahan directs the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child
Wellbeing and is an associate of the Office of Population Research. Her
research interests include family demography, stratification, and social
policy. She is co-author of Fathers Under Fire: The Revolution
in Child Support Enforcement (1998), Social Policies for Children
(1996); Growing Up with a Single Parent (1994), Child Support and Child Wellbeing
(1994), and Single Mothers and Their Children: A New American
Dilemma (1986).
Sara McLanahan's home page
Katherine Magnuson
Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1350 University Avenue, Room 315
Madison, WI 53706-1323
(608) 263-4812
kmagnuson@wisc.edu
- Socioeconomic status and child development
- Early education and intervention
- Welfare reform and family wellbeing
Katherine Magnuson's primary research interests focus on better understanding
the association between socioeconomic disadvantage and child development, as
well as how to promote healthy development among disadvantaged children. Her
current work focuses on understanding the intergenerational transmission of
human capital, particularly the effects of maternal education on children, and
the role of early education interventions in improving children's school readiness.
Stephen Malpezzi
Lorin and Marjorie Tiefenthaler Professor and Chair of the Department of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics
School of Business
University of Wisconsin-Madison
5257 Grainger Hall
975 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706-1323
(608) 262-6007
smalpezzi@bus.wisc.edu
- Housing markets and policy
- Housing price measurement
- Real estate, urban development
- International economic development
Stephen Malpezzi is Robert E. Wangard Faculty Scholar and Chair of the Department of Real Estate
and Urban Land Economics. His research focuses on the intersections of urban
development, housing and real estate markets, and welfare economics, in the
United States and internationally. For example, he has constructed housing price
indexes that are being used by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics
in the construction of experimental poverty measures. His current work includes
analyzing the causes of central city-suburban economic disparities, and the
effects of land use and housing regulation on low-income households. With IRP
Affiliate Richard Green, Malpezzi has recently completed A Primer on U.S.
Housing Markets and Policy, forthcoming from the American Real Estate and
Urban Economics Association.
Stephen Malpezzi's home page
Robert D. Mare
Professor of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles
264 Haines Hall
Box 951551
375 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551
(310) 825-5585
mare@ucla.edu
- Labor market and marriage market trends
- Intergenerational social mobility
- Socioeconomic differences in adult mortality
- Determinants of educational attainment
Robert D. Mare is Director of the California Center for Population Research
at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current poverty-related
research lies in two general areas. First, he is investigating the ways
that differential fertility, mortality, immigration, marriage, and family structure,
in combination with intergenerational social mobility, have affected aggregate
trends in distributions of educational attainment, income, and poverty in the
United States. Second, he is participating in the design and analysis of a large
panel survey of neighborhoods in Los Angeles. His research based on this
survey focuses on residential mobility, neighborhood formation, and processes
leading to socioeconomic and residential segregation. Mare won the 1999
Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award from the Methodology Section of the American Sociological
Association.
Robert Mare's home page
Maurizio Mazzocco
Assistant Professor of Economics
University of California, Los Angeles
Bunche Hall 8283
Box 951477
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477
(310) 825-1100
mmazzocc@econ.ucla.edu
- Household intertemporal behavior
- Intrahousehold risk sharing
- Full commitment and limited commitment models of the household
Maurizio Mazzocco's research focuses on the analysis of the household decision
process, especially under uncertainty. A specific question concerns whether
household members can share individual risks and smooth consumption even in
highly risky and volatile environments. A second topic is related to the intrahousehold
allocation of resources and its effect on household consumption and savings.
His current research includes also a theoretical and empirical work aimed
at testing full commitment and limited commitment models of household behavior.
Maurizio Mazzocco's home page
Marygold Melli
Voss-Bascom Professor Emerita of Law
University of Wisconsin-Madison
9113 Law Building
975 Bascom Mall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-1610
msmelli@wisc.edu
- Family law, criminal law, juvenile justice, law and the elderly
- Legal aspects of child support
Marygold Melli's research interests center on child support issues with a particular
focus on support in dual-residence cases, guideline reform, and the relation
between child support and visitation.
Mary Haywood Metz
Professor of Educational Policy Studies, Emerita
University of Wisconsin-Madison
221 Education Building
1000 Bascom Mall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6863
mhmetz@wisc.edu
- Effects of community social class on teachers' practice and students' opportunity
to learn
- Qualitative study of schooling of poor children and children of color
- Models of school organization developed in research and implicit in the
federal No Child Left Behind Act
Mary Haywood Metz's current research, based upon qualitative analysis of six public high schools in large metropolitan areas, is exploring the ways in which the social class of a community affects teachers' practice, thus strongly influencing the well-established links between students' social class and their educational achievement. She finds that as federal and state pressures for standardization of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment intensify, it is increasingly important to understand the myriad formal and informal ways in which local community characteristics shape the core work of staff and students in every individual school.
She is planning a systematic review of models of school organization implicit
and explicit in ethnographic studies of schools and in studies based on survey
research—which she will compare to models implicit in current federal law and
in the standards and practices of two diverse states.
Mary Haywood
Metz's home page
Poverty-related publications
Daniel Meyer
Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
3434 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-7336
drmeyer1@wisc.edu
- Economic support for single-parent families, including child support
and welfare
- Policy knowledge
Daniel Meyer is a member of the IRP Executive Committee. In 1990-91 and again
in 1993, he was an economist and policy analyst for DHHS/ASPE, researching
child support, poverty, and income transfer payments and welfare reform costs.
In 1997-98 and 2005-06 he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of York
(UK), researching international approaches to family policy. Since 2001,
he has been the Director of the School of Social Work. His current research
interests include effects of child support and welfare reforms; international
approaches to child support policy; the economic well-being of women after
they leave welfare; multiple-partner fertility; and how much individuals
know about the social policies that affect them. He is Co-Principal Investigator,
with Maria Cancian, of the Child
Support Demonstration Evaluation in Wisconsin.
Daniel
Meyer's: home
page | curriculum
vitae
Marcia K. Meyers
Professor of Social Work and Public Affairs
Director, West Coast Poverty Center
University of Washington
Box 354900
4101 15th Avenue, NE
Seattle, WA 98195-4900
(206) 616-4409
mkm36@u.washington.edu
- Child and family welfare
- Income and gender inequality
- Child care and parental leave
- Social program implementation
- Comparative studies of the welfare state
Marcia K. Meyers earned an M.P.A. at Harvard University and an M.S.W. and Ph.D.
from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Meyers' research
focuses on public policies and programs for vulnerable populations, including
public welfare services, child welfare programs, and child care services.
Her papers have appeared recently in the Journal of Public Policy and Management,
the European Journal of Social Policy, Social Services Review
and Social Science Quarterly.
Marcia Meyers's
home page
Robert Moffitt
Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics
Johns Hopkins University
Mergenthaler Hall
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218-2685
(410) 516-7611
moffitt@jhu.edu
- Evaluation methodology
- Microsimulation models
- Incentive effects of welfare
Robert Moffitt's research focuses on the incentive and behavioral effects of
the U.S. welfare system, including AFDC/TANF, Food Stamps, and Medicaid. He
has studied the effects of these programs on work incentives, welfare participation,
and family structure and fertility. He has also conducted research on statistical
methods for evaluating poverty programs. His current research includes a study
of how to model the AFDC caseload; the economic determinants of female headship;
and new methods for program evaluation. He is also currently involved in a new
longitudinal study of low-income women and children in the aftermath of welfare
reform, with Andrew Cherlin, William Julius Wilson, and others. Professor Moffitt
is past Associate Editor of the American Economic Review, past Co-Editor
of the Review of Economics and Statistics, and past Editor of the Journal
of Human Resources.
Robert Moffitt's home page
Poverty-related publications
James Montgomery
Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
2436 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-4475
jmontgom@ssc.wisc.edu
- Social networks in the labor market
- Urban poverty
James Montgomery is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UW-Madison. A mathematical sociologist,
he attempts to formalize sociological theories. His work has explored the role of social networks in
the labor market, examining whether the widespread use of referrals could help explain persistent
inequality across demographic groups. He has also developed formal models based on ethnographic
accounts of urban poverty. His current research attempts to formalize role theory.
Donald P. Moynihan
Associate Professor of Public Affairs
Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin–Madison
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-6633 dmoynihan@lafollette.wisc.edu
- Selection and implementation of public management reforms
- Crisis management
- Performance management
Donald Moynihan's research focuses on the management of public policies. This
includes the implementation of such policies at the front lines, and the efforts
to measure organizational performance. His research on performance management
details how performance measures are used to emphasize certain goals over others.
His research on crisis management studies how public agencies coordinate amid
crisis response and the implications of their response for citizens included
case studies of Hurricane Katrina incident command systems. Current related research
includes examination of public agencies' response to catastrophic flooding in
southern Wisconsin during the summer of 2008.
Donald
Moynihan's home page
N
Salvador Navarro-Lozano
Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin–Madison
7444 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-3281
snavarro@ssc.wisc.edu
- Economics of schooling
- Economic evaluation of policies
- Applied econometrics
- Identification of economic choice models and associated treatment effects
Salvador Navarro's main line of research focuses on understanding schooling
attendance; in particular, trying to determine the importance played by background,
family income, credit constraints, uncertainty, heterogeneity, and preferences.
In recent work he also looks at the methodology used in studies of social
mobility and inequality, at the determinants of participation in the informal
economy, and at estimation of option values of schooling.
Derek Neal
Professor of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637-1539
(773) 702-8166
d-neal@uchicago.edu
- Racial differences in labor market outcomes
- Links between marriage market and labor market outcomes
Derek Neal's current research seeks to measure labor market inequality among
black and white women as well as men in the United States. He is exploring how
racial differences in patterns of employment complicate the task of measuring
racial differences in labor market opportunities for men and women. In related
work, he is trying to understand the determinants of family structure and the
forces driving black-white differences in family structure and is studying the
process of convergence in skills, earnings, and family structures between black
and white populations in the United States. In this regard, he also seeks to
understand the causes and consequences of rising incarceration rates among less
educated black men.
Derek Neal's home page
Jennifer Noyes
Researcher, IRP
University of Wisconsin–Madison
3430 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1393
(608) 262-7990
jnoyes@ssc.wisc.edu
- Child care
- Child support
- Job training and workforce policy
- Program and management evaluation
- Welfare policy
- Integration of human services programs
Prior to joining the Institute for Research on Poverty, Jennifer Noyes was a senior fellow at the Madison office of the Hudson Institute's Welfare Policy Center. She has served in senior positions with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, including Executive Assistant to the Secretary, where she was responsible for managing key external relations related to policy development for, and implementation of, the state's work-related programs. She also served as the administrator of the department's Division of Economic Support, where she was responsible for the management, development, administration, and direction of Wisconsin's programs designed to assist and support low-income families in their efforts to achieve self-sufficiency. In both of these roles, Noyes served as Wisconsin's lead in the development and implementation of Wisconsin Works (W-2) policy, the state's ground-breaking welfare replacement program. Other past professional positions include director, Performance Evaluation Office, Wisconsin Department of Administration. Her work with the Department of Administration built on her eleven years of service to the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau, a nonpartisan legislative service agency charged with completing relevant and timely program evaluations and other audits of state and public agencies.
O
Pamela E. Oliver
Conway-Bascom Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
8143 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6829
oliver@ssc.wisc.edu
- Collective action and social movements
- Collective turmoil and violence
- Racial movements and community mobilization
- Race and imprisonment
Pamela E. Oliver's major research interests center on the interplay between
grassroots or citizen action of various forms and governmental or elite responses.
The ability of impoverished populations or those concerned about them to obtain
redress through political systems depends on the results of various kinds of
citizen action (both legal and disruptive or violent). A recent project examined
the interplay among political cycles and processes and news media cycles and
processes in determining whether and how people are able to bring issues into
the public sphere. In this project, police and newspaper records of public events
were compared. Another project seeks to identify the factors behind the large
racial disparities in imprisonment rates. This work has involved a special emphasis
on Wisconsin, while newer work compares states. This project recognizes that
the economic and social well-being of communities are damaged when a high proportion
of a community's young adult population is in prison. A theoretical project
develops coevolution models for the ways in which authorities and protesters
or criminals respond to each other over time.
Pamela E. Oliver's home page
Michael Olneck
Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
211 Education Building
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-9967
olneck@education.wisc.edu
- Schooling and social stratification
- Schooling and racial and ethnic inequality
Michael Olneck is currently conducting research on educational responses
to ethnic and racial diversity in American education since the 1920's,
and is attempting to assess the potential of multiculturalism in contemporary
American education to promote equality.
Michael Olneck's
home page
P
Alberto Palloni
Board of Trustees Professor in Sociology
Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
1808 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, IL 60208-1300
(847) 467-4039
a-palloni@northwestern.edu
- Childhood and maternal health status and poverty
- Conditions of minorities
Alberto Palloni's main areas of research are maternal and child
health care and mortality, aging, and formal modeling in demography. He
is currently the coordinator of a large effort to collect data on the health
status and economic well-being of elderly populations in Latin America.
Alberto Palloni's
home page
David J. Pate, Jr.
Assistant Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
P.O. Box 786
1053 Enderis Hall
Milwaukee, WI 53201
(414) 229-6038
pated@uwm.edu
- welfare reform policy
- child support enforcement policy
- fatherhood
- domestic violence
- the intersection of race and poverty
David Pate's research involves the use of qualitative research methods to examine noncustodial fathers of children on welfare and their interaction with their children, the child support enforcement system, the mother of their children, and the incarceration system. He conducted research under the Wisconsin Child Support Demonstration Evaluation (Institute for Research on Poverty), examining the same variables with white and African American fathers and a selected partner. Pate is a research consultant to the Strengthening Healthy Marriage project, a seven-year longitudinal research and evaluation study of strategies for enhancing couple relationships among low-income married parents in the United States.
Jamie Peck
Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography
University of British Columbia
1984 West Mall
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
Canada
(604) 822-0894
peck@geog.ubc.ca
- Political economy of workfare
- Labor market restructuring
- Contingent work and working poverty
Jamie Peck's research interests are in the restructuring of labor markets and
antipoverty programs, theories of labor segmentation and economic regulation,
and the political economy of state reform. Currently working on issues of contingent
work and low-wage labor markets, he is author of Work-Place: The Social Regulation
of Labor Markets (Guilford, 1996) and Workfare States (Guilford,
2001).
Jamie Peck's
home page
Poverty-related publications
Irving Piliavin
Emeritus Professor of Social Work and Sociology
5105 Sealane Way
Oxnard CA 93035
(805) 985-2436
piliavin@ssc.wisc.edu
- Foster care
- Homelessness
- Social service delivery
- Criminology
Irving Piliavin's areas of specialization include criminology and correctional
programming, organization and delivery of welfare services, and social service
program evaluation. He has served as consulting editor for the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, the American Sociological Review,
and Social Psychology Quarterly. His current research interests include
evaluation of welfare reform programs, foster care programs, and homelessness.
Robert Plotnick
Professor of Public Affairs and Adjunct Professor of Economics and Sociology
Evans School of Public Affairs
University of Washington
Box 353055, Parrington Hall
Seattle, WA 98195-3055
(206) 685-2055
plotnick@u.washington.edu
- Determinants and effects of nonmarital childbearing
- Welfare dynamics and welfare policy
- Demographic effects of income transfer policies
Robert Plotnick is senior advisor to the Population Leadership Program at the
University of Washington. His research interests include poverty, income inequality,
income support policy, teenage childbearing, and related social policy issues.
His current research focuses on nonmarital childbearing in the United States.
One study is analyzing the relationship between child support policy and nonmarital
childbearing among both teen and adult women. Another is examining the long-term
rise in nonmarital childbearing during 1920-1993 and some of the factors that
have contributed to it. A third is investigating factors associated with teenagers'
expectations about the likelihood that they will become unwed parents.
Robert Plotnick's home page
Poverty-related publications
Q
Lincoln Quillian
Associate Professor of Sociology
Northwestern University
1812 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, IL 60208-1330
(847) 491-7488
l-quillian@northwestern.edu
- Urban poverty
- Race and ethnic relations
- Statistical methodology
Lincoln Quillian's interests are, in general, social stratification,
race and ethnic relations, and urban sociology. Most of his current research
focuses on high-poverty neighborhoods and neighborhood racial segregation.
Lincoln Quillian's home page
R
Andrew Reschovsky
Professor of Public Affairs
La Follette School of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
307 Observatory Hill Office Building
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-0447
reschovsky@lafollette.wisc.edu
- The distribution of tax burdens
- Fiscal responses of states to welfare reform
- Financing of an adequate public education for low-income students
Andrew Reschovsky is Professor of Applied Economics and Public Affairs at the
UW-Madison. His current research interests include tax policies to increase
homeownership among low- and moderate-income households, the impact of devolution
on the fiscal health of central cities, school finance formulas to provide
adequate education to low-income students, and the design of a grant system
for the financing of education in South Africa.
Andrew
Reschovsky's home page
Arthur J. Reynolds
Professor of Child Development
Institute of Child Development
University of Minnesota
51 East River Road
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0345
(612) 625-4321
ajr@umn.edu
- Design and evaluation of early childhood interventions
- Childhood poverty and its effects
- Evaluation research methods
- Prevention science
Arthur J. Reynolds's poverty-related research focuses on the effects of school-
and family-based interventions for poor children. He is also interested in evaluation
research methods. For over a decade he has directed the Chicago Longitudinal
Study, a prospective investigation of the long-run effects of participation
in a large-scale early childhood intervention program for economically disadvantaged
children and families. The project has begun the early-adulthood phase with
a focus on educational attainment, postsecondary outcomes, and benefit-cost
analysis.
Roberta Riportella
Professor of Consumer Science, School of Human Ecology
Health Policy Specialist - Family Living Program
University of Wisconsin-Cooperative Extension
1300 Linden Drive, Room 346
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-7088
rriporte@wisc.edu
- Consumer health education
- Improving access to health care coverage
- Public-health policy evaluation
Roberta Riportella’s current research includes an evaluation of BadgerCare enrollment
and outreach as Project Director for the Partnerships to Connect Schools, Health,
and Public Health Insurance, the Wisconsin Healthier Partnership Program, Medical
College of Wisconsin. Other current research includes Coordinating Partnerships
to Improve Access to Health Care Coverage, Wisconsin Partnership Fund for a
Healthy Future, UW School of Medicine and School of Public Health, which Riportella
is involved with in her role as Project Director for Covering Kids and Families
Wisconsin, a coalition-based Medicaid outreach organization.
Consumer Health Education home page
Stephanie Robert
Associate Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1350 University Avenue, Room 312
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-6336
sarobert@wisc.edu
- Socioeconomic status and health across the life course
- Long-term care policy and programs
Most of Stephanie Robert's research examines socioeconomic inequalities in health
over the life course, focusing particularly on how neighborhood socioeconomic
and racial context affect the health and well-being of residents. She is also
interested in long-term care policies and programs and is conducting research
on Wisconsin's Family Care Program--a pilot long-term care program that implements
a managed care approach to financing and delivering community-based and institutionally
based long-term care supports and services.
Stephanie
Robert's home page
Philip K. Robins
Professor of Economics
University of Miami
P.O. Box 248126
517 Jenkins Building
Coral Gables, FL 33124-8126
(305) 284-5664
probins@miami.edu
- Evaluation of welfare, employment and training programs
- Social experimentation and public policy
- Welfare reform
Philip K. Robins's current research focuses on the use of financial incentives
to reduce dependence on public assistance, the economic effects of childhood
characteristics on earnings as an adult, and the economic effects of employment
and training programs. He recently published an article comparing the child
care systems in the United States and Canada and coedited a book on the U.S.
Unemployment Insurance bonus experiments.
Philip K. Robins's home page
Poverty-related publications
Joel Rogers
John D. MacArthur Professor of Law, Political Science, and Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7114B Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4266
jrogers@cows.org
- Postwar U.S. labor and employment policy; unionism
- Distribution of legal services in U.S.
- Basic income guarantees
Joel Rogers is the Director of the Center on
Wisconsin Strategy (COWS). He is the author of numerous books and articles
on American politics, political theory, industrial policy, and worker organization.
Recent publications include Working Capital: Using the Power of Labor's Pensions
(2001) and America's Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still
Matters (2000).
Joel Rogers's home
page
Ingrid Rothe
Researcher Emerita, IRP
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7401 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison WI 53706
(608) 262-5843
irothe@ssc.wisc.edu
- Child support program operations and outcomes
- The uses of performance measures and indicators of client well-being to monitor welfare program operation
- How low-income families combine the of use public programs and employment
to support their children
Ingrid Rothe worked in child support and welfare policy development and welfare
data collection and research prior to coming to IRP. At IRP, she helps facilitate
the analysis of administrative data by researchers.
S
Gary Sandefur
Dean, College of Letters & Science and Professor of
Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
105 South Hall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-2303
gsandefur@ls.admin.wisc.edu
- Single-parent families
- Teenage and nonmarital childbearing
- Minorities and poverty
Professor Sandefur's research interests include the study of social and racial
stratification and racial inequality. Among current projects are a study of
the effects of family disruption and geographical mobility on social capital
outside the family, and the effects of these on educational attainment. Another
project involves following state rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing and changes
in these in response to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation
Act.
Gary Sandefur's
home page
Nora Cate Schaeffer
Professor of Sociology
Director, UW Survey Center
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4422 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-2182
schaeffe@ssc.wisc.edu
- Child support, especially quality of parental self-reports about awards
and payments
- Survey methodology
Nora Cate Schaeffer's primary research interests are in the field of survey
research methods; she has served on the National Research Council's Panel to
Evaluate Alternative Census Methods and the Council of the American Association
for Public Opinion Research and is currently a member of the Committee on National
Statistics of the National Research Council. Her poverty-related research has
focused upon demographic and social issues related to child support. In particular,
she has examined the measurement of concepts important for the study of separated
families, including child support awards and payments, and how the characteristics
of child support awards affect perceptions of the fairness of awards, compliance,
and family conflict. Results of these studies influenced the redesign of the
Child Support Supplement for the Current Population Survey.
Nora Cate Schaeffer's
home page
Walton O. Schalick III
Assistant Professor of Medical History & Bioethics, Orthopedics & Rehabilitation,
History of Science, and Pediatrics
Department of Medical History & Bioethics
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Medical Sciences Building, Room 1410
1300 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6760
schalick@wisc.edu
- Children with disabilities in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the last two centuries and the poverty-related policies and legislation they were often subject to
Walton Schalick's research splits in three directions. His poverty-related
work concerns children with disabilities (whose families were often poor and
the object of poverty-related policies and legislation) in France, Germany,
the United Kingdom, and the United States over the last two centuries. A second
research interest is in clinical and applied ethics research on children with
emergency conditions; and the third seeks to understand the role of universities
in recreating medieval markets, particularly around pharmaceuticals. He is
a member of the Waisman Center.
Walton Schalick’s Web Pages (Medical
History & Bioethics, Department
of Orthopedics & Rehabilitation, Department
of the History of Science, and Waisman
Center)
Maximilian D. Schmeiser
Assistant Professor of Consumer Science
University of Wisconsin–Madison
1300 Linden Drive, Room 370F
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: 608-262-2831
Email: mschmeiser@wisc.edu
- Economics of obesity
- Labor market participation and vulnerable populations
- Earned Income Tax Credit
- Disability policy
Max Schmeiser’s current research interests are in three main areas: What
are the economic causes and consequences of the increasing prevalence of obesity?
Which measure of fatness best predicts various health and socioeconomic outcomes?
How does the Earned Income Tax Credit alter the economic decisions of low-income
families?
John Karl Scholz
Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7454 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5380
jkscholz@wisc.edu
- Earned Income Tax Credit; tax policy in general
- Consumption and saving of American households
John Karl Scholz is a past director of IRP. His current research focuses
on two primary areas: understanding the effects of the earned income tax credit
(EITC) and other policy interventions to assist low-wage workers, and the degree
to which families are preparing adequately for retirement. His current work
on the EITC uses administrative data from California and Wisconsin to study
its effects (and the effects of welfare reform and local labor market conditions)
on the economic well-being of low-skilled workers. His work on saving adequacy
uses data from the Retirement History Survey (from the 1970s), Health and Retirement
Survey (from the 1990s), and data from the Surveys of Consumer Finances to
better understand factors influencing the saving and consumption decisions
of American households.
John Karl Scholz's home page
Christine Schwartz
Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4404 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5791
cschwart@ssc.wisc.edu
- Marriage patterns and economic inequality
- Assortative mating
- Union formation and educational achievement
Christine Schwartz's research interests are in the areas of social
demography, family, and stratification. She has several current projects
that explore the relationship between changes in union formation and
dissolution, assortative mating, and economic inequality in the United
States. Another line of research investigates how and why partner choice
differs depending on the type of union sought. To this end, she is
currently investigating partner selection among opposite-sex married and
cohabiting couples and same-sex male and female couples.
Christine Schwartz's home page
Sherrill L. Sellers
Associate Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1350 University Avenue, Room 303
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-3677
slsellers@wisc.edu
- Social inequalities and health
- Intergenerational issues
- Gender and family
- Social welfare policy--urban issues
- Life course studies
- Race and ethnicity
During 1997-2000, Dr. Sellers was the investigator for an NIMH Minority Supplement
Grant under the leadership of Sheldon Danziger, Director of the Social Work
Research Development Center on Poverty, Risk, and Mental Health at the University
of Michigan. Her research examined the mental and physical health consequences
of social mobility. Her research interests include the life course, health consequences
of social inequalities, and intergenerational relations. Her most recent poverty-related
research projects include a study of the social origins of goal striving stress,
a study of the impact of racial discrimination on hypertension among high-status
black men, and a study of the well-being of African immigrant children and their
families.
Sherrill
L. Sellers's home page
Judith A. Seltzer
Professor of Sociology
University of California, Los Angeles
264 Haines Hall
Box 951551
375 Portola Plaza
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551
(310) 825-5646
seltzerj@ucla.edu
- Child support, custody, and visitation arrangements; conflict between
parents and the effect of conflict on relationships between parents and
children who live apart
- Intergenerational relationships
- Inequality within and between families
Judith A. Seltzer's poverty-related research focuses on child support
issues. Her work examines the relationships among legal custody, paying
child support, visiting children, and conflict between parents after divorce.
Professor Seltzer is also investigating the establishment of paternity,
and the child support and child-rearing arrangements of parents whose children
were born outside of marriage.
Judith
A. Seltzer's home page
Marsha Seltzer
Director, Waisman Center and Vaughan Bascom Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
T201 Waisman Center
1500 Highland Avenue
Madison, WI 53705-2280
(608) 263-5940
mseltzer@waisman.wisc.edu
- Mental retardation and poverty
- Aging parents of mentally retarded children
Marsha Seltzer's research focuses on the life-course impacts of disability on
the family, with particular interest in how lifelong caregiving affects the well-being
of parents and siblings of individuals with disabilities, including autism, Down
syndrome, and schizophrenia. In addition, she has studied how the family environment
affects the development of individuals with disabilities. She has recently completed
a 12-year study of aging families who had an adult son or daughter with mental
retardation living at home when the study began. The research examined the pattern
of age-related changes and transitions in these families, how the changes affected
the son or daughter with the disability, and the antecedents and consequences
of out-of-home placement of the adult child.
A second line of research involves the comparison of parents of adults with
developmental disabilities (most recently, autism) with parents of adults with
schizophrenia. A third line of research traces the life course impacts of parenting
a child with a disability through study of a unique cohort, the participants
in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS). Together, these studies offer specific
insights about parenting a child with a disability, revealing both the stresses
of this challenge and the resiliency of parents who cope successfully.
Marsha Seltzer's
home page
Ananth Seshadri
Associate Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
7440 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6196
aseshadr@ssc.wisc.edu
- Demography and the Wealth of Nations
- International Fertility Differences
Ananth Seshadri currently works on the effects of demographic change on the wealth
and poverty of nations. His recent work shows that differences in fertility
rates and life expectancies across countries create large disparities in stocks
of human capital and consequently output per capita. In ongoing work, he argues
that differences in productivity levels across countries explain international
differences in fertility and schooling.
Kristen Shook Slack
Associate Professor of Social Work
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1350 University Avenue, Room 310
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-3671
ksslack@wisc.edu
- Child maltreatment
- Child welfare services
- Welfare reform
Kristi Shook Slack's research interests focus on the etiology of different forms
of child maltreatment and the relationship between poverty and child neglect.
She is also interested in the relationship between welfare and child welfare
systems, particularly in the context of welfare reform. She is currently a co-investigator
of a five-year longitudinal study of low-income families with young children.
The major goal of this study is to assess the unique etiologies of various types
of child neglect as a function of changes in family income, parental employment,
and health care coverage.
Kristi
Shook Slack's home page
Timothy M. Smeeding
Director, Institute for Research on Poverty
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
3420 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 890-1317
smeeding@lafollette.wisc.edu
- public policy, especially social policy and at-risk populations
- poverty and income distribution, income transfers, and tax policy
- health economics
Tim Smeeding's home page
Michael R. Sosin
Emily Klein Gidwitz Professor of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago
969 E. 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637-2640
(773) 702-1129
m-sosin@uchicago.edu
- Organizations/institutions serving the poor
- Homelessness
- Managed care
- Nonprofit social service agencies
Michael R. Sosin is currently involved in two projects of relevance to poverty.
One (with Thomas D'Aunno) is a national study of the relationship between drug
treatment units and behavioral health managed care firms. The study considers
the way managed care firms attempt to control treatment providers, the reasons
that the mechanisms they use vary, and the impacts of the mechanisms on various
types of providers. The second (with Steven R. Smith), is examining the
role of religious providers in delivering care under devolution. This
pilot study considers how faith-based and faith-related providers make use of
religion in service delivery and in their responses to changes in government
priorities. We specifically focus on material assistance, child welfare,
advocacy, and immigrant service organizations.
Michael R. Sosin's
home page
Joe Soss
Professor of Public Affairs
Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service
Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota
301 19th Avenue, South
Minneapolis, MN 55455
(612) 626-9865
jbsoss@umn.edu
- Politics of poverty and inequality
- Policy formation and implementation
- Race/ethnicity, gender, and class
- Public opinion and political behavior
Joe Soss is Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs. His primary
areas of teaching and research include the politics of poverty and social
policy; political psychology, public opinion, and political behavior; and
empirical theory and research methodology. He is the author of Unwanted
Claims: The Politics of Participation in the U.S. Welfare System (University
of Michigan Press, 2000), a study that investigates welfare institutions
as sites of political action and learning for citizens. He is also co-editor
of Race
and the Politics of Welfare Reform (University of Michigan Press, 2003),
a volume that explores the historical and contemporary role of race in U.S.
welfare politics. His current research projects focus on the race and gender
politics of social policy formation, the ways policy choices shape the politics
of poverty and inequality, and the ways welfare policy implementation is
being shaped by privatization, devolution, and frontline discretion.
Michael Stoll
Professor and Chair of Public Policy and Urban Planning
UCLA School of Public Affairs
3250 Public Policy Building, Box 951656
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1656
(310) 206-4774
mstoll@ucla.edu
- Urban poverty and inequality
- Labor market difficulties of low-skilled workers
- Employment situation of ex-offenders
Michael A. Stoll is an Associate Professor of Public Policy, and Associate Director
of the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty, at the University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA). His main research interests include the study of urban poverty
and inequality, specifically the interplay of labor markets, race/ethnicity,
geography and workforce development. Dr. Stoll's published work includes an
examination of the labor market difficulties of African Americans and less-skilled
workers, in particular the role that racial residential segregation, job location
patterns, employer discrimination, transportation and job information play in
limiting employment opportunities. He served as a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City
in 1999-2000.
Currently, Dr. Stoll has begun major research projects to examine the labor
market consequences of mass incarceration in the United States. This research
program will include a detailed examination of employers' willingness to hire
ex-offenders, how employers check for criminal backgrounds of potential employees,
and whether employers statistically discriminate in hiring against groups with
high incarceration rates, such as African Americans. He is also investigating
whether the recent increase in prisoner release as a result of mass incarceration
in the U.S. has affected regional crime rates.
Michael Stoll's home page
T
Christopher Taber
Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6446 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-7791
ctaber@ssc.wisc.edu
- economics of education
- wage growth
- sources of income inequality
Christopher Taber, Richard A. Meese Chair of Applied Econometrics, Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a labor economist whose research focuses on the development and implementation of econometric models of skill formation including schooling, on-the-job training and other forms of human capital investment. His research includes studies of Catholic schooling and vouchers, wage growth among low-wage workers, the importance of borrowing constraints in schooling decisions, and general equilibrium models of the labor market.
Elizabeth Thomson
Professor of Sociology, Emerita
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4452 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-6125
thomson@ssc.wisc.edu
- Fertility
- Values, life plans, and life events
- Education and family stability
- Family structure and child well-being
Elizabeth Thomson is Professor of Sociology at UW-Madison and Professor of
Demography at Stockholm University. She is a demographer with roots in social
psychology and the measurement of subjective phenomena. Much of her work
has focused on couple data on fertility and family behavior. She has also
studied stepfamily childbearing decisions and the relationship between union
experience and contraceptive sterilization. She is currently directing a
project on the implications of education for family building and family stability
and will soon develop a program of research on family change, economic resources
and child well-being. All of this work takes a cross-national comparative
perspective using data from the United States and several European countries.
Elizabeth Thomson's
home page
Leann M. Tigges
Professor of Rural Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
314 Agricultural Hall
1450 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 890-0347
lmtigges@wisc.edu
- Flexiblization of employment: contingent work and nonstandard schedules
- Economic transformation and labor market inequality
Leann M. Tigges's research interests focus on issues related to economic transformation
and labor market inequalities. Professor Tigges is interested in the relative
explanatory power of human capital (what one knows) versus social capital
(who one knows or where one lives) for a variety of labor market processes
and outcomes. Her current research concerns labor utilization strategies of
manufacturers in Wisconsin, especially their use of temporary workers and
their shift schedules. These strategies are associated with wages and labor
force composition.
Leann
Tigges's home page
Ruth N. López Turley
Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4424 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-0726
rturley@ssc.wisc.edu
- Neighborhood effects
- Child poverty
- Educational inequality
Ruth López Turley is investigating factors that lead to educational inequality
that are often experienced by poor children. In particular, she is studying
the effect of college proximity (living close to colleges) on high school students'
chances of applying to college. She is especially interested in students whose
parents want them to stay home for college and in seeing how this parental
preference influences their college application patterns.
Ruth N. López Turley's
home page
Poverty-related publications
W
James Walker
Professor of Economics
University of Wisconsin-Madison
6462 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-3863
walker@ssc.wisc.edu
- Modeling fertility behavior
- Internal migration
James Walker is a member of the Advisory Board of the Journal
of Human Resources. Professor Walker's research interests include the
study of influence of economic conditions and public policies on migration
and fertility decisions over the life cycle. A current project investigates
how teens form expectations and aspirations and their influence on teenage
pregnancy and fertility behavior. Another project investigates the influence
of economic conditions on internal migration flows.
James Walker's home page
Geoffrey Wallace
Associate Professor of Public Affairs
La Follette School of Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-6025
wallace@lafollette.wisc.edu
- Economics of marriage and the family
- Poverty and public policy
- Labor economics
His research is in the areas of labor economics, the economics of marriage and
the family, and policy issues relating to poverty. Current projects examine
the effects of changing economic conditions on living arrangements among young
people, the effects of competition on educational outcomes, and issues of child
support enforcement. His research on educational outcomes includes a study
of the effects of Milwaukee's public school choice program on student achievement.
Professor Wallace received his doctorate in Economics from Northwestern University.
Geoffrey
Wallace's home page
Franklin Wilson
William H. Sewell-Bascom Professor of Sociology Emeritus
University of Wisconsin-Madison
4446 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-2182
wilson@ssc.wisc.edu
- Migration/Immigration
- Urban housing and labor markets
- Ethnicity
Franklin Wilson's home page
Michael Wiseman
Research Professor of Public Policy and Economics
Institute of Public Policy
George Washington University
614 Media and Public Affairs, Suite 602
805 21st Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052-0002
(202) 994-8625
wisemanm@gwu.edu
- Evaluation of welfare reform
- Management of social assistance
- Use of administrative data for program management and evaluation
Michael Wiseman's research interests include comparative social welfare policy,
program and policy evaluation, and the management of programs of public assistance.
Over the past decade Dr. Wiseman has been an active participant in the formulation
and evaluation of welfare reform initiatives in the United States, Europe, and
South Africa. He is a consultant on program management and evaluation to various
state and federal agencies and has served as consultant on policy and evaluation
for the Department for Work and Pensions in the United Kingdom and the South
Africa Department of Welfare. In 1997 he was appointed by then Governor Tommy
Thompson to be Vice Chair and ranking external member of the Steering Committee
for the Wisconsin Works Management and Evaluation Project (W-2 MEP), a research
effort intended to provide guidance for analysis of implementation and contracting
issues arising in the context of Wisconsin's reforms. He currently is a resident
consultant on welfare reform in the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) in the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Visiting Scholar in the Office
of Disability and Income Assistance Programs (ODIAP) in the Social Security
Administration. At OFA he is working on alternatives for comparative assessment
of state programs for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. At ODIAP he is
contributing to research on the Supplemental Security Income program as well
as international comparison of disability assistance policy and outcomes.
Michael Wiseman's home page
Poverty-related publications
Whitney P. Witt
Assistant Professor of Population Health Sciences
Co-Director, BioPop: Integrative Biopsychosocial Research in Population Health
School of Medicine and Public Health
University of Wisconsin–Madison
610 Walnut Street, Room 503
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 265-6290
wwitt@wisc.edu
- Social, behavioral, and psychological factors that contribute to healthy aging
- Impact of acute, chronic, and terminal illness on the family system
- How familial relationships influence individuals’ health behaviors, health and mental health status, and healthcare services use
Whitney Witt’s research focuses on the impact of acute, chronic, and terminal illness on the family system and aims to determine how familial relationships influence the health behaviors, health and mental health status, and healthcare services use of individuals over time. The poverty-related aspects of her work include the examination of (1) the influence that illness has on family finances and (2) poverty as a risk factor for the development of illness in the family.
Whitney Witt's home page
John Witte
Professor of Political Science and Public Affairs
University of Wisconsin-Madison
217 North Hall
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-5715
witte@lafollette.wisc.edu
- School choice
- Public policy and administration
- Organizational theory
John Witte was Director of the Robert M. La Follette School for Public Affairs
from 1999 to 2002. He served as Executive Director of the Governor's Commission
on the Milwaukee Metropolitan School System, and as independent evaluator
of the Milwaukee School Choice Program. His book The Market Approach
to Education: An Analysis of America's First Voucher Program appeared
in 1999.
John
Witte's home page
Barbara Wolfe
Professor of Economics, Public Affairs, and Population Health Sciences
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 263-2029
wolfe@lafollette.wisc.edu
- Determinants of success of young adults
- Poverty and health issues; disability, children's health
- Economic well-being of children
- Teen pregnancy
- Adequacy of savings of retired and disabled
- Evaluation of S-CHIP, especially BadgerCare
Barbara Wolfe's recent research has addressed five main issues: the intergenerational
determinants of success in young adults (with Robert Haveman and Gary Sandefur),
the economics of disability, the adequacy of savings among the recently retired
and disabled (with Bob Haveman and Karen Holden), and the effects of welfare
reform. Work on the first topic has included the roles of family and neighborhood
(including income and stress-related factors), and of state and community programs
on the educational achievement of young adults. Research on the economics of
disability has examined the incentive effects of disability-related transfer
programs, the impact of poor health on wages and hours worked, and the role
of social security in reducing poverty among the disabled. Wolfe's studies of
welfare reform include work with IRP affiliates Cancian, Haveman, Kaplan, and
Meyer on the economic well-being and labor force experience of former welfare
recipients in Wisconsin. Current research focuses on the role of expansions
in public health insurance on health care coverage and labor force outcomes.
Wolfe is also examining the association of income and wealth with health, emphasizing
trends over time and differences by race, and (with John Mullahy) is exploring
trends in health across subpopulations in the United States, using a broad set
of indicators of health and health-related behaviors. Wolfe's other research
interests include the incentives of state-based TANF programs, measuring the
wealth and economic well-being of recent retirees as well as the disabled, and
private, employer-based provision of health insurance.
Barbara
Wolfe's home page
Poverty-related publications
Erik Olin Wright
Vilas Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
8112D Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-0068
wright@ssc.wisc.edu
- Cross-national study of class structure in industrial societies
Erik Olin Wright is Director of the A.E. Havens Center for the Study of
Social Structure and Social Change at the UW-Madison. Current research relevant
to poverty revolves around the general problem of class in contemporary capitalist
societies and the nature of the class structure within which poverty is a central
feature. He is currently working on a project exploring the changing pattern
of the quality of job growth across employment expansions since the early 1960s,
focusing specifically on the relationship between the expansion of good and
bad jobs.
Erik Olin Wright's home page
Poverty-related publications
Lawrence Wu
Professor and Director, Center for Advanced Social Science Research
New York University
295 Lafayette Street
Puck Building, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10012
(212) 992-9565
lawrence.wu@nyu.edu
- Family structure and single motherhood
- Nonmarital childbearing and the life course
- Statistical methods
Lawrence Wu's current research interests include nonmarital fertility, life
course transitions during early adulthood, and statistical methods. His research
has investigated black/white differentials in nonmarital fertility and how changes
in family structure during early life affect subsequent risks of a first out-of-wedlock
birth, entry into sexual activity, and other fertility and family formation
outcomes. He chairs the Technical Review Panel of the National Longitudinal
Surveys, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and is a member of the Board of Directors
of the Population Association of America.
Lawrence Wu's
home page
Z
Zhen Zeng
Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin–Madison
4406 Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
(608) 262-4436
zzeng@ssc.wisc.edu
- Immigration
- Race/ethnicity
- Stratification
- Demography
- Social psychology
- Quantitative methods
Zhen Zeng’s research includes examination of Asian Americans’ earnings disadvantage,
personality development in late midlife, the contextual determinants of racial
boundaries in adolescent friendship, and a longitudinal analysis of Asian Immigrants’ earnings
assimilation.
Zhen Zeng's home page
James P. Ziliak
Professor and Carol Martin Gatton Endowed Chair in Microeconomics
Director, UK Center for Poverty Research
University of Kentucky
335 Gatton Business and Economics Building
Lexington, KY 40506-0034
(859) 257-2776
jziliak@uky.edu
- Incentive and insurance effects of U.S. tax and welfare programs
- Asset accumulation among low-income households
James P. Ziliak is Director of the University of Kentuckys UK Center
for Poverty Research, one of the three ASPE-funded Area Poverty Research Centers.
His primary research focuses on the impacts of the U.S. income tax and transfer
system on household labor supply, consumption, and saving. In addition, he has
conducted several studies on the impacts of the macroeconomy and welfare reform
on AFDC/TANF and food stamp caseloads. Recent projects include an examination
of the 1980s tax reforms on the ability of households to insure consumption
against shocks to income; a decomposition of the poor-nonpoor wealth gap; an
examination of the impact of TANF on household saving; and an examination of
the impact of income inequality, welfare reform, and economic growth on state-level
poverty rates.
James Ziliak's home page |