The Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group (HCEO) continued to advance innovative thinking and approaches to studying inequality and human capital development in 2019.

This year we worked towards our commitment to train the next generation of scholars by hosting three Summer Schools on Socioeconomic Inequality: in Moscow, Russia, and for the first time in Bergen, Norway and Chengdu, China. We also hosted a summer school for undergraduates at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China. We are grateful to our partners at Jinan, the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, the New Economic School, and the Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality (FAIR) at NHH, for making these summer programs a great success.

We also awarded two dissertation prizes, to Yujung Hwang, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Geneva, for her dissertation, "General Equilibrium Theory and Empirical Analysis of Immigrants’ Neighborhood Sorting and Social Integration, and Yeonju Lee, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, for her dissertation "Democracy Without Redistribution: The Sense of Injustice, Perceived Inequality, and Preferences for Redistribution." 2019 marked the third year we have awarded a dissertation prize, and we look forward to offering a fourth in 2020.

In 2019, HCEO was pleased to disseminate our members' academic findings to broader audiences. This year we produced 10 new Research Spotlights, which distill top HCEO working papers into news-quality articles. The year’s most engaging research spotlight featured "Motherhood and the Gender Productivity Gap," a paper by MIP network member Yana Gallen.

We added 84 papers to our working paper series, of 436 (and counting), which were accessed over 12,000 times on RePEc.

Looking ahead, HCEO is dedicated to fostering the spirit of new economic thinking through three summer schools (in Chengdu, Bonn, and Guangzhou), our dissertation prize competition, and other programming. We are also excited to feature the work of our members through our Research Spotlights, interviews, 3 Questions, and news and awards posts on Twitter and Facebook. We look forward to continued growth in the years to come.

You can download a copy of our 2019 Year End Report here.