James Joseph Heckman is an American economist and Nobel laureate who serves as the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, where he is also a professor at the College, a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD), and Co-Director of Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group. He is also a professor of law at the Law School, a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and a research associate at the NBER. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1983, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000, which he shared with Daniel McFadden. He is known principally for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics.
The poverty threshold, poverty limit, poverty line, or breadline is the minimum level of income deemed adequate in a particular country. The poverty line is usually calculated by estimating the total cost of one year's worth of necessities for the average adult. The cost of housing, such as the rent for an apartment, usually makes up the largest proportion of this estimate, so economists track the real estate market and other housing cost indicators as a major influence on the poverty line. Individual factors are often used to account for various circumstances, such as whether one is a parent, elderly, a child, married, etc. The poverty threshold may be adjusted annually. In practice, like the definition of poverty, the official or common understanding of the poverty line is significantly higher in developed countries than in developing countries.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) of South Africa is Africa's largest dedicated social science and humanities research agency and policy think tank. It primarily conducts large-scale, policy-relevant, social-scientific projects for public-sector users, for non governmental organisations and international development agencies in support of development nationally, in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and in Africa.
Seymour Martin Lipset was an American sociologist and political scientist. His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. He also wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. He was president of both the American Political Science Association (1979–1980) and the American Sociological Association (1992–1993). A socialist in his early life, Lipset later moved to the right, and was considered to be one of the first neoconservatives.
The Economic and Social Research Institute is an Irish research institute founded in 1960 to provide evidence-based research used to inform public policy debate and decision-making. The research of the institute focuses on the areas of sustainable economic growth and social progress. Alan Barrett is the Director of the institute.
Victor G. Nee is an American sociologist and professor at Cornell University, known for his work in economic sociology, inequality and immigration. He published a book with Richard Alba entitled Remaking the American Mainstream proposing a neo-assimilation theory to explain the assimilation of post-1965 immigrant minorities and the second generation. In 2012, he published Capitalism from Below co-authored with Sonja Opper examining the rise of economic institutions of capitalism in China. Nee is the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Professor, and Director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University. Nee received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, and has been a visiting fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York ( 1994–1995), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1996-1997). He was awarded an honorary doctorate in Economics by Lund University in Sweden in 2013.
Richard Layte is a professor of sociology at Trinity College Dublin, appointed in 2014.
Michèle Lamont is a Canadian sociologist who is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and a professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is a contributor to the study of culture, inequality, racism and anti-racism, the sociology of morality, evaluation and higher education, and the study of cultural and social change. She is the recipient of the Gutenberg Award and the Erasmus award, for her "devoted contribution to social science research into the relationship between knowledge, power, and diversity." She has received honorary degrees from five countries. and been elected to the British Academy, Royal Society of Canada, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques, and the Sociological Research Association. She served as president of the American Sociological Association from 2016 to 2017. In 2024, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Professor Wei-Jun Jean Yeung is a Taiwanese sociologist and demographer, now is the professor of Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She chairs the Family, Children, and Youth Research Cluster in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in NUS.
Christopher Sandy Jencks is an American social scientist.
Sara Lynne Arber is a British sociologist and Professor at University of Surrey. Arber has previously held the position of President of the British Sociological Association (1999–2001) and Vice-President of the European Sociological Association (2005–2007). She is well known for her work on gender and ageing, inequalities in health and has pioneered research in the new field of sociology of sleep.
William A. "Sandy" Darity Jr. is an American economist and social scientist at Duke University. Darity's research spans economic history, development economics, economic psychology, and the history of economic thought, but most of his research is devoted to group-based inequality, especially with respect to race and ethnicity. His 2005 paper in the Journal of Economics and Finance established Darity as the 'founder of stratification economics.' His varied research interests have also included the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African American reparations and the economics of black reparations, and social and economic policies that affect inequities by race and ethnicity. For the latter, he has been described as "perhaps the country’s leading scholar on the economics of racial inequality."
Anthony Francis Heath, CBE, FBA is a British sociologist who is a professor of sociology at Oxford University and a professorial fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.
Jens Beckert is a German sociologist with a strong interest in economic sociology. The author of books on inherited wealth and the social foundations of economic efficiency and imagined futures in the economy, he focuses on the role of the economy in society – especially based on studies of markets – as well as organizational sociology, the sociology of inheritance, and sociological theory. He is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG) in Cologne, Germany, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Lane Kenworthy is an American professor of sociology and political science. He has worked at the University of Arizona since 2004, being a full professor since 2007. He is known for his statistical and analytic work on the economic effects of income and wealth distribution. He currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego.
Arne Lindeman Kalleberg is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Faculty Fellow at the Carolina Population Center. He is also an adjunct professor in the Kenan-Flagler Business School, the Department of Public Policy, and the Curriculum in Global Studies. Kalleberg served as the secretary of the American Sociological Association from 2001 to 2004 and as its president from 2007 to 2008. He has been the editor-in-chief of Social Forces, an international journal of social research for over ten years. He was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2024.
Stephen Lawrence Morgan is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Education at the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences and Johns Hopkins School of Education. A quantitative methodologist, he is known for his contributions to quantitative methods in sociology as applied to research on schools, particularly in models for educational attainment, improving the study of causal relationships, and his empirical research focusing on social inequality and education in the United States.
Seymour Michael "Mike" Miller (1922–2021) was an economic-political sociologist, activist, and emeritus professor of sociology at Boston University.
David Bryan Grusky is an American sociologist and the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He is also a senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. He formerly taught at Cornell University, where he was the founder and founding director of the Center for the Study of Inequality.
