James Sullivan is a Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. He also is co-founder and Director of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO), a research center that works with service providers and policymakers to identify effective and scalable solutions to reduce poverty in America. He has been a visiting scholar at the National Poverty Center and has served on its Advisory Board. He was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and has served as a national Phi Betta Kappa Visiting Scholar. In 2019, he was appointed to the U.S. Commission on Social Impact Partnerships. His research examines the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs at the national, state, and local level. He also studies the consumption, saving, and borrowing behavior of poor households, as well as poverty and inequality measurement. Sullivan has published numerous journal articles and book chapters and his work has been covered by major media outlets including CNN, the Wall St. Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Forbes, Fox News, Barron’s, Bloomberg News, Slate, the Atlantic Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, National Public Radio, and others. He has testified at Congressional hearings on evidence-based policy on multiple occasions. In 2023, he was also appointed as the inaugural Director of the Notre Dame Poverty Initiative. Sullivan received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

DAVID NEUMARK is Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine, where he directs the Economic Self-Sufficiency Policy Research Institute (ESSPRI). He does research in numerous areas of labor economics that intersect with important public policy issues, most significantly with respect to anti-poverty policy, discrimination, and local economic development incentives. Professor Neumark was one of the original contributors to the “new minimum wage research,” helping to pioneer the use of state-level minimum wage variation to estimate minimum wage effects. His subsequent work moved well beyond the debate over employment effects, to study the effects of minimum wages on the income distribution, long-run effects of minimum wages on human capital and earnings, and complementarities between minimum wages and the Earned Income Tax Credit. In related work, he was the first to assemble data and explore methods to study the effects of city living wage laws, as well as contributing to understanding the political economy of these laws. His current work on anti-poverty policies focuses on comparisons between the minimum wage and alternative policies, with a particular emphasis on the long-term effects of these policies in encouraging economic self-sufficiency. Professor Neumark received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1987. He has held prior positions at the Public Policy Institute of California, Michigan State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Federal Reserve Board. He is currently also a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

JOSHUA GOTTLIEB is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.  His research in applied microeconomics focuses on the economics of the health care system, including the organization of insurance markets, physician behavior, administrative costs, and implications for labor economics.  Gottlieb also conducts research in public finance more broadly, including urban and health economics.  He is a Co-Editor of the Journal of Public Economics and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  Gottlieb has published in academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Journal of Labor Economics.   He won the 2015 Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics and the 2012 National Tax Association Dissertation Award for this work. Gottlieb’s research focuses on questions directly relevant to public policy.  He was instrumental in developing and promoting a novel property tax scheme, which influenced housing policy in British Columbia. Gottlieb completed his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University in 2012.  He was previously an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University.

KATRINE V. LOKEN is Professor of Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics. Her PhD is from University of Bergen in 2010. She is co-research director at CELE since 2017, and a Principal Investigator at the Centre of Excellence FAIR (Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality). Her main research interests are in early investments in children, and the long-term outcomes and effects of different social policies. She has focused on identifying causal effects of policies such as parental leave, subsidized day care, father’s quota in leave, and cash subsidies for families. Her work combines state-of-the art statistical analysis with access to uniquely detailed Norwegian register data. More recently, she has started a new project looking at the causal effect of incarceration. With the aim of pushing the research frontier in the economics of crime, Loken has acquired access to unique datasets on criminals and victims. Loken’s work has been published in leading economic journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. Her work has been widely disseminated in international media, including for example The Atlantic, Freakonomics Blog, and Harvard Business Review. She is currently Op-ed columnist at Dagens Næringsliv. Loken is a research fellow at CEPR, IZE and CES-ifo and Professor II at University of Bergen and Statistics Norway. She is on the board of editors at The Review of Economic Studies. She was awarded the Nils Klim Prize in 2017, a price given annually to a young Nordic scholar within law, humanities and social sciences. Loken is the Principal Investigator for the project Social Costs of Incarceration, funded by the Norwegian Research Council from 2015-2018.

GORDON B. DAHL is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. He is also an Affiliated Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics, the Area Director for Labor Economics for the CESifo Research Network, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Professor at the ifo Institute, a CESifo Research Fellow, a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and a Fellow of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. He previously was a faculty member at the University of Rochester and has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, Princeton University, University of Copenhagen, University of Stockholm, University College London, Norwegian School of Economics, and CESifo Munich. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1998 and his B.A. from Brigham Young University in 1993. Dahl’s research interests are in labor economics and applied microeconomics, including a wide set of issues that range from how income affects child achievement, to peer effects among coworkers and family members, to the impact of incarceration on recidivism and employment, to inter-generational links in welfare use. His articles have appeared in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.