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

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:

1. 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;
2. 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.
3. Welfare and earnings of low-income New Yorkers (with Cordelia Reimers, Hunter College).
4. 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

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 Associate Professor, La Follette School of Public Affairs, and a faculty affiliate of IRP. Her primary areas of research expertise are in social welfare policy, public management, and econometric methods for social program evaluation. Her current poverty-related research projects include work with the state of Wisconsin on a child-support demonstration program, with the U.S. Department of Labor on its performance management system, and with the governments of Argentina, Brazil, and Honduras on their social and human capital development programs. Other ongoing projects include an investigation of policy factors that support effective provision of substance abuse treatment services, and a study of labor market intermediaries and labor market outcomes for low-skilled and disadvantaged workers. Heinrich has co-authored 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.

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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.

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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 i