Stefanie Schurer is an Associate Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. Her research interest is the Economics of Human Development. Most of her current projects explore the evolution of skills, preferences, and health over the lifecourse and the role that parents and the public sector play in determining these skills. She is involved in several linked administrative data projects in Australia, evaluating among others the impact of early-life medical care and cash/in-kind transfers on children’s skill development.

Jin Zhou’s research mainly focuses on understanding the impact of education on the lifecycle outcomes of individuals. Recently, her work has focused on two main aspects: skill development during early childhood; and education decisions involving location choices. For the former, she currently focuses on research on the China REACH project, especially on identifying latent skills in children, understanding the child skill development process, and designing and studying interventions aimed at accelerating the child learning process.

John Eric Humphries is a Cowles Foundation postdoctoral associate at Yale University and will be an assistant professor in economics at Yale University starting in July 2018. His research focuses on topics in labor economics and applied microeconomics. In particular, he studies how educational and career dynamics are affected by public policy. Much of my work considers how policies affect the acquisition of human capital and the role of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in the labor market. 

Zhong Zhao is Professor of Economics at Renmin University of China and a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). His main areas of interest are labor economics, applied microeconometrics, social program evaluation and economy of China. His recent research topics on China include children's health, earnings instability and inequality, rural-urban disparity, comparison of wage evolutions in India and China, and rural-urban migration.

Raji Jayaraman's research in development and labor economics examines the role of incentives and social preferences on the decisions and performance of students, workers, and consumers. She has examined the effect of incentive pay on worker productivity; school feeding programs on student outcomes; defaults on charitable donations; and immigration on employment. In collaboration with theorists, she has also worked on the identification of peer effects in social interactions models.

V. Joseph Hotz is the Arts and Sciences Professor of Economics at Duke University and a research associate of the Duke Population Research Institute. He specializes in the areas of labor economics, economics of the family, economic demography, applied econometrics, and evaluating the impact of social programs. For his contributions to his field, Professor Hotz has appeared on the list of Who's Who in America since 1993. He was also named a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2003.

Dan A. Black is a professor at the Harris School and a Senior Fellow at the National Opinion Research Center. He currently serves as the principal investigator for the 1997 Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, is co-project director (with Bob Michael) of the NLSY program at NORC, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Labor Economics, Labour Economics, and the Journal of Urban Economics.

Pietro Biroli is starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Zurich. He is interested in the process of health and human capital development in children and adolescents. In particular, his current research explores the interaction between genetics, family investments, and early childhood interventions in explaining the long-term inequality across gender and socioeconomic status. More broadly, he is interested in Labor Economics, Health Economics, and Applied Microeconometrics.