The Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group held its 2nd Summer School on Socioeconomic Inequality (SSSI 2013), at the University of Chicago from July 15-July 20, 2013 under the direction of Steven N. Durlauf, James J. Heckman, and Scott Duke Kominers. SSSI 2013 was supported by the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics.

This summer school provided state-of-the-art overviews of different aspects of the study of inequality. While no summer school can cover inequality in all its dimensions, this summer school and its successors examined areas essential to understanding inequality and human flourishing in a comprehensive fashion. Our intention is to provide an intensive one-week experience that teaches the tools needed to study inequality as well as communicates a sense of the research frontier in understanding inequality. The teaching of tools is of particular importance as efforts to integrate richer psychological and sociological foundations of human behavior into conventional economic models require new methods that in some cases are not conventionally taught in graduate programs. Further, SSSI intends to break down barriers between theoretical, econometric and empirical work.