Linyi Zhang just earned her master's degree from the National School of Development, Peking University and will join the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University this fall as a graduate student.

Her master thesis studies the role of kinship networks in promoting entrepreneurship in rural China, with the intention of understanding how social networks can help the disadvantaged social groups improve their economic outcomes and ultimately reduce income inequality. She is also interested in the sources of intergenerational immobility and relevant policy implications.

Guillermina Jasso is Silver Professor and Professor of Sociology at New York University. She was the founding director of the Methods Workshop at New York University (1991-1997) and the founding director of the Theory Workshop at the University of Iowa (1988-1991), as well as a co-founder of the Life Course Center at the University of Minnesota. She served as Special Assistant to the Commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (1977-1979) and as Director of Research for the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy (1979-1980).

Elizabeth Bruch is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. Her work applies statistical techniques and insight from marketing and decision theory to the study of neighborhood and mate choice.

Gustavo Ventura is a Professor in the Economics Department of the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He previously held positions at the University of Western Ontario, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Iowa. His research interests are on inequality, taxation and economic development from a macroeconomic perspective.

Timothy M. (Tim) Smeeding is the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) since 2008.

Ravikumar's research on human capital covers a wide range of topics: from public education financing determined by the majority to economic growth and inequality. He has been a member of the faculty at the University of Virginia, the Pennsylvania State University and the University of Iowa. He is currently part of the Research Division at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Krishna Pendakur is a Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser university. He spent the last 18 years studying statistical and econometric issues relating to the measurement of economic discrimination, inequality and poverty. A group of papers (jointly written with Ravi Pendakur) established that visible minorities and Aboriginal people face great disparity in Canadian labour markets, and that this disparity shows no sign of eroding over time. A more recent group of our papers has shown that Aboriginal people face staggeringly poor labour market outcomes.

Andy Newman is Professor of Economics at Boston University; previously he held posts at University College London, Columbia and Northwestern. He works in a number of areas of economic theory pertinent to understanding inequality, including economic development, matching theory and organizational economics. He pioneered the use of contract theory in the analysis of income distribution and developed the concept of an inequality trap. He has also studied the interaction between the internal organization of firms and the distributions of wealth and income.

Stephen Machin is Professor of Economics at University College London and Research Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. He is one of the Editors of the Economic Journal. Previously he has been visiting Professor at Harvard University (1993/4) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2001/2). He is an fellow of the British Academy, has been President of the European Association of Labour Economists, is a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, a member of the UK Low Pay Commission and of the recently set up Tuition Fees Commission.

Jeremy Lise is an assistant professor at University College London (UCL) and a research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). He is a board member of the Review of Economic Studies; associate editor of the European Economic Review; member of the Network on Family Inequality, Becker Friedman Institute; and member of the Centre for Macroeconomics (CFM).

Lise received a B.A. (Honours) in Economics from the University of Guelph in 1998, an M.A. in Economics from McMaster University in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Queen's University in 2006.