The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley was created to serve as a research hub for campus and beyond, enabling UC Berkeley’s world-leading scholars to deepen our understanding of the inequality in society and formulate new approaches to address the challenge of creating a more equitable society. The Center serves as the primary convening point at UC Berkeley for research, teaching and data development concerning the causes, nature, and consequences of wealth and income inequalities with a special emphasis on the concentration of wealth at the very top.
2024 Summer Institute
We are accepting applications for early-stage PhD students to attend a Summer Institute at Berkeley. Deadline to apply is February 15, 2024. Information and application are available at the Summer Institute website.
Emmanuel Saez
Emmanuel Saez is Professor of Economics and Director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley. He received his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1999. His research focuses on inequality and tax policy. Jointly with Thomas Piketty, he created the top income share series that show a dramatic increase in US inequality since 1980. The data have been widely discussed in the public debate. His most recent book "The Triumph of Injustice", joint with his colleague Gabriel Zucman, narrates the demise of US progressive taxation and how to reinvent it in the 21st century. He received numerous academic awards including the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association in 2009, a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 2010, and an Honorary degree from Harvard University in 2019. Read more
Hilary Hoynes
Hilary Hoynes, co-director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley, is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy and holds the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the University of California Berkeley where she also co-directs the Berkeley Opportunity Lab. Her research focuses on poverty, inequality, food and nutrition programs, and the impacts of government tax and transfer programs on low-income families. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. She has served as Co-Editor of the American Economic Review and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. She currently serves on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years. Read more
Gabriel Zucman
Gabriel Zucman is Summer Research Professor and Summer School Director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, and director of the EU Tax Observatory. He is the author of articles published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, and of two books. His research focuses on the accumulation, distribution, and taxation of global wealth and has renewed the analysis of the macro-distributional implications of globalization. In a series of papers and in his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations, he has developed methods to measure the wealth held in tax havens. This research finds that 8% of the world’s household financial wealth is held in tax havens, with large variation across countries—from a few percent in Scandinavia to 50% in Russia. Data leaked from offshore financial institutions (such as the “Panama Papers”) suggest that offshore wealth is highly concentrated. Read more
Mathilde Muñoz
Mathilde Muñoz is Assistant professor of economics and a faculty affiliate at the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley. Mathilde works on topics in public economics and international trade, with a particular interest for the distributional effects of globalization and tax competition. Her research has been awarded the Young Economist Award from the International Institute for Public Finance in 2019, the OECD Future of work fellowship in 2020 and the Arthur Sachs prize in 2021. Since 2020, she has been appointed by the European Commission as a national expert for international mobility and trade in services in France and Belgium, as part of the POSTING.STAT consortium. She will receive her PhD in Economics from Paris School of Economics in 2022 after spending the 2021-2022 year as the Arthur Sachs research fellow at Harvard Economics department. Read more
Eva Seto
Eva Seto is Associate Director of the Social Science Matrix and administers the Summer Institute for the Stone Center at Berkeley. Her education and many years of experience working in research institutes on the Berkeley campus provide Matrix with knowledge about the social-science landscape on campus, as well as the management skills to help successfully administer the programs, centers, and projects of Matrix. Eva earned her M.A. and B.A in Economics from UC Berkeley.
Camille Fernandez
Camille is the Executive Director for the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality along with The Robert D. Burch and Center for Labor Economics. She has worked in the economics department in several roles, including serving as center manager for various centers. She is a former staff member of the UC Berkeley Police Department where she supported the department for 20 years.
Jakob Brounstein
Jakob Brounstein is PhD Candidate in economics at UC Berkeley studying public and labor economics. He specializes in issues related to fiscality, tax avoidance/evasion, and inequality. His current work focuses on the tax externalities of homelessness policy and comprehensively estimating the changes in benefits absorbed and taxes collected in response to changes in individuals’ homelessness status.
Cristóbal Otero
Cristóbal is a PhD Candidate in Economics at UC Berkeley. He holds a BA and an MA in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He also obtained an MSc in Philosophy of the Social Sciences from the London School of Economics. His fields of interest are public and labor economics. His current research focuses on the impact of corporate taxation on investment and wages. His website can be found here
Javier Feinmann
Javier Feinmann is an Argentinian economist pursuing his PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley. He earned his B.A. in Universidad de Buenos Aires and his M.A. in Universidad Torcuato di Tella, both in Buenos Aires. His current research agenda is at the intersection of Public, Labor and Development Economics, with a particular focus on inequality and the government's role in the economy. He works on topics related to tax evasion in developing countries.
Nina Roussille
Nina Roussille will join MIT’s Economics Department as an Assistant Professor in 2023, after spending the 2021-2022 academic year as an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at LSE and the 2022-2023 academic year as a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT. Nina works on topics in labor, gender and public economics, with a particular interest for the distributional effects of labor market policies. She received her PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley in 2021 and previously worked as a pre-doctoral fellow at Harvard for the Opportunity Insight lab.
Wouter Leenders
Wouter Leenders is a PhD student at the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley. In his research he studies the distribution of wealth, income, and taxes, as well as the effect of government policies on these distributions. He obtained a BA in Economics from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Will Sandholtz
Will Sandholtz is a PhD student in the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley. He primarily studies public finance and microeconomic theory. Recently, he has researched how corporate tax rates affect the location of U.S. multinationals' profits and capital stock. Will also holds undergraduate degrees in economics and statistics from UC Berkeley.
Carmen Durrer
Carmen Durrer de la Sota is a research assistant at the World Inequality Lab and a graduate student at the Paris School of Economics. She holds a degree in social sciences from Sciences Po Paris.
Arthur Vasconcellos Pacheco Weiss
Arthur Vasconcellos Pacheco Weiss is a Pre Doc at Institute for Research on Labor & Employment. He holds a BA in Economics and in Theater and Performance Studies from UC Berkeley. He wrote his senior thesis on the impact of recreational marijuana legalization on the use of hard drugs and is now aiding in researching the impact of school reform in Brazil. His thesis will soon be available here.
Eva Davoine
Eva Davoine is a PhD student at Haas, UC Berkeley. She holds a BA and an MA in Economics from Sciences Po Paris and worked as a pre-doctoral fellow at the World Bank. Her current research is at the intersection of Public, Political and Development Economics. She is particularly interested in tax resistance movements and inequalities, both in developed and developing countries.
Felipe Lobel
Felipe is a PhD candidate in the Economics Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research lies on the intersection of Public, Labor and Development Economics. His work focuses on the effects of corporate taxation. He combines theory and data to deepen our understanding about firm dynamics, labor markets, and the design of redistributive policy. His research relies on data from the US, Honduras, and mostly Brazil. Find out more on his website.
The 2022 World Inequality Report
March 2022 The Stone Center Annual Lecture: Global wealth, gender and carbon injustice
Presentation by Lucas Chancel, editor of the 2022 World Inequality Report.
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality awards grants for Berkeley students and faculty working on issues related to inequality. Grants have an annual funding cycle with an application deadline of late spring. An email will be sent each spring to the Berkeley community with the application announcement and the due date. Additional funding for students is available on an ongoing basis for travels, data purchases, and other research-related expenses; please contact us.
The UC Berkeley James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality gratefully acknowledge support from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation.