Students

Hema is an MRes Economics student on the MRes/PhD Economics programme in the Department of Economics. Her research interests lie in the areas of development, environmental and labour economics.  

Hema holds an MA in Economics from the University of Toronto and a BComm (Hons) in Econometrics and Economics from Monash University. Before joining the programme, she worked as a predoctoral researcher at the Yale Economic Growth Center.

My research interests lie at the intersection of economic inequality, gender, labor markets, and environmental vulnerability in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). I’m especially interested in how institutions—such as those governing education, work, and environmental resilience—shape patterns of opportunity and constraint. Educational environments, for instance, can play a critical role in either expanding or limiting long-term economic mobility, particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. 

I’m also drawn to questions about how climate change interacts with existing social and economic inequalities. In many LMICs, environmental shocks can disrupt livelihoods and deepen disparities in employment and income. I’m interested in policies that promote inclusive climate adaptation—ensuring that efforts to build resilience do not leave behind the communities most at risk.

Email:  h.balarama@lse.ac.uk

I pursued a bachelor's and two one-year master's degrees in economics at the KU Leuven in Belgium. I started studying economics because I was interested in inequality and how it is affected by economic policies. During my studies, I discovered public economics as the framework to study such questions and wrote two Master's theses on inequality-related topics. Last year, I moved to London to work as a pre-doc at LSE on research studying income-related health inequalities with Johannes Spinnewijn. This year, I started my PhD in Economics at the LSE. Along with doing the coursework, I am also working on a project studying the joint impact of income and wealth on life expectancy with Kaveh Danesh.

I have always been interested in questions related to economic inequality and the redistributive effects of economic policies. In my future research, I hope to work on redistributive impacts of public policies generally. This includes a broad range of fiscal policies aimed at alleviating important problems. To give a specific example, I hope to apply these interests to environmental policy, as they will be of great importance in a warming world. I aim to improve our understanding of how policies aimed at lowering emissions affect people along the income distribution. This includes examining the direct effects of environmental policy, such as how consumption taxes impact people with varying consumption patterns differently and induce heterogeneous responses across income levels. Additionally, I also plan to study more indirect effects, as these fiscal policies could potentially have dynamic effects on the development and adoption rates of new technologies, which in turn could have distributional consequences.

Email:  b.beyen@lse.ac.uk

I’m a second-year PhD student in Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), where I’m affiliated with the FAIR Centre. My research focuses on labor, public economics, and gender inequalities. Before starting my PhD, I worked at the AXA Research Lab on Gender Equality at Bocconi University, where I also completed my Bachelor’s degree. I later earned a joint Master’s from Bocconi and the London School of Economics.

During my bachelor’s I spent a semester at UC Berkeley. It was a defining experience that marked my first real exposure to inequality research and it sparked collaborations and friendships that continue to shape my academic path. I’m excited to be back!

Alongside my academic work, I’ve also contributed to policy research for European institutions. Outside of work, I love the outdoors, especially skiing (downhill, not the Norwegian kind), and anything creative, with a special love for sewing.

My research focuses on economic and social inequalities, with a particular emphasis on how labor market structures and public policies shape long-term disparities. In one project, I examine the relative impact of early-life factors, such as socioeconomic background and education, versus fertility choices and labor market mobility on wage inequalities. This work focuses on women who break the glass ceiling, investigating the factors behind their success compared to those who fall through the “leaky pipeline.” A key aim is to disentangle the roles of early conditions, career dynamics, and family decisions in shaping women's outcomes and the gender wage gap.

In related work, I plan to further explore the intersection of employment, intergenerational mobility, and fertility. Across several projects, I study how family policies and socioeconomic background influence economic outcomes and contribute to persistent gender gaps in the labor market. My research is driven by questions such as: What explains why some women advance while others stall, even when they start from similar early-life conditions? What role do public policies play in shaping household decision-making and fertility timing? And how do informal factors, such as networks and peer effects, contribute to inequality across generations?

Email:  irene.brusini@nhh.no

Hi! I’m Isabella, an incoming third-year PhD student in Economics at Columbia University. Before starting my PhD, I completed a Master’s in Economics at the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF) in Rome. Born and raised in Rome, I’ve always loved history and the arts, and I spend much of my free time visiting museums or catching an art exhibition. I’m also a passionate reader (though the PhD doesn’t leave as much time as I’d like!) and enjoy reading classic literature in Italian, French, Spanish, and English. One day, I’d love to learn Russian so I can read the greats in their original language.

My research interests lie at the intersection of labor and public economics, with a focus on how tax and social insurance policies shape economic inequality both across and within socio-economic groups. I am especially interested in the distributional effects of unemployment insurance (UI) systems. In the U.S., UI financing relies on taxes applied to a low taxable wage base, placing a disproportionate burden on low-wage, part-time, and seasonal workers—groups where women and minorities are overrepresented. Additionally, UI eligibility criteria often require continuous full-time employment, creating structural barriers for women and other marginalized populations. Understanding these dynamics is essential to assessing the equity and efficiency of UI programs.

I am also interested in tax evasion and its role in shaping inequality. Evasion behavior varies across the income distribution and can alter the progressivity of the tax system. I am particularly curious about how evasion differs across tax bases and how it spreads through social networks. As research on tax evasion and avoidance continues to evolve, I am excited to explore how individuals’ responses to tax policy are shaped by their employment status, social environment, and opportunities for evasion.

Email: isabella.difilippo@columbia.edu

I am a rising third-year PhD student in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, broadly interested in the causes and consequences of wealth and income inequality. Since early 2024 I have also worked as a research assistant in the social sciences division of the Santa Fe Institute. Prior to starting my PhD, I earned a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, double majoring in mathematics and economics, as well as a master's degree in systems engineering. 

My research interests broadly concern the reciprocal relationship between distribution and long-run forces such as technical change and institutional transformations. I am also interested in theoretical problems related to the measurement of inequality, as well as approaches that model inequality as an emergent property of complex economic systems.

One project I am currently involved in investigates the distributional effects of robotization and the adoption of AI, modeling both trends as forms of biased technical change that will predominantly impact occupations characterized by near-complete contracts. Another uses panel data from more than a dozen countries to determine how much inequality in incomes can be attributed to chance, leveraging comparisons of same-sex siblings to control for most other determinants of income. A third line of research examines the growth implications of rising inequality in reform-era China, especially how distributional changes have interacted with sectoral dynamics and policy shifts over time.

While my formal training is in economics, I’m also influenced by my previous exposure to systems science and computational social science, and I’m always open to opportunities to integrate insights across fields. I'm very much looking forward to learning from the diverse array of interests and experience other attendees will bring!

Email:  maxgreenberg@umass.edu

I am second year Econ PhD student at Columbia University from Gilroy, CA (about an hour south of Berkeley).  I did my undergrad also at Columbia where I majored in, believe it or not, Economics.  Before graduate school, I spent two years as a research assistant at the Joint Committee on Taxation, a committee of Congress composed of tax lawyers and tax economists who help craft and score tax legislation for the US Congress.  While there, I worked with administrative tax data developing datasets useful for scoring legislation and research with a focus on connecting employees and owners to firms.

Outside of Economics, I enjoy playing basketball, soccer and volleyball and rooting for Bay Area sports teams.  I also enjoy hiking, doing the New York Times crossword and reading science fiction.

I am interested in using tax data to understand how to efficiently collect revenue from wealthy and high-income individuals. I am especially interested in understanding the avoidance and evasion behaviors of rich individuals and how tax systems can be altered to improve collection from the top of the income and wealth distributions. I am currently (jointly) working on a project to measure the wealth held in “dynastic” trusts using tax data.  I am also interested in understanding how personal deductions and closely-held businesses are used and abused to avoid taxes. I am working on a project that uses a change in the incentives faced by donors (increased competition for athlete labor) to college sports teams to understand how the charitable donations and business expenses such as advertising are used as tax-free consumption.  I am also interested in understanding the determinants of corporate tax incidence. Outside of tax, I am interested in the personnel of the state, both elected and unelected.  I am in the early stages of projects on the decision to run for local legislative office and thinking about how to incorporate effects on intermediate inputs into AKM-style measures of manager productivity.

Email:  eric.heiser@columbia.edu

I am a second year Economics PhD student at the University of Michigan. I hold an MA in Applied Economics from Western Michigan University and a BA in Economics from Vassar College.

My research interests are in public finance and industrial organization. I use tools from these fields to study historical inequality in the United States.

Email:  jenelso@umich.edu

I am a PhD student in Economics at the Paris School of Economics, supervised by Thomas Piketty. I am originally from Lisbon, Portugal, where I completed my bachelor's and master's degrees at Nova School of Business and Economics. Before starting my PhD, I worked as a research assistant in labor economics and wage inequality at Nova, and later in public economics and tax evasion at the EU Tax Observatory in Paris. After completing my master's at PSE, I began my doctoral studies, where I am exploring the relationship between inequality and political conflict in Western democracies.

Inequality is central to all my research. Before beginning my PhD, I published work on economic inequality from multiple perspectives: in labor economics, examining the distributional effects of minimum wages; in economic history, analyzing Portugal’s unique inequality trajectory; and in public economics, investigating various dimensions of tax evasion at the EU Tax Observatory. Building on this, my PhD research explores the political economy of inequality, focusing on how socioeconomic divisions shape political behavior and policy outcomes in Western democracies. My dissertation begins with Portugal, where I examine why traditional class-based voting patterns have persisted despite broader European shifts. I argue that redistributive and predistributive policies - such as public education expansion, collective bargaining, and minimum wage increases - have enabled the traditional left to maintain strong working-class support, while also helping to explain the delayed rise of the far right. In parallel, I am developing a broader comparative research agenda, studying similar dynamics across other Western democracies to better understand how inequality continues to structure political conflict in diverse institutional and historical contexts.

Email:  carlos.masoli@gmail.com

Mark G. Sheppard is a fourth year PhD student in Economics at the City University of New York, The Graduate Center, I hold a Masters in Public Policy from the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy, a Masters of Arts in Political Economics from Georgetown University, in collaboration with the Solvay Brussels School - Economics & Management, and a Bachelors of Arts in Legal Studies with a concentration in Law & Economics from University of California, Berkeley.

Sheppard is a research assistant with the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Stone Center of Socio-Economic Inequality, working on the GC Wealth Project. Previously, Sheppard was a fellow in Data Visualization at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, and a research assistant with the Stone Center for Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy. Sheppard is a Specialist, commissioning as Lieutenant, with the U.S. National Guard and previously worked as an analyst in the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, California State Senate, and other local municipalities.

Sheppard is an inequality scholar, with broad experience in public policy, and a focus in research communication and data visualization. Sheppard’s current research agenda focuses on the ways in each labor market inequities are precursors and co-indicators of recession, and how poor policy responses to recession, whether fiscal or monetary, can result in deeper inequities.

Email:  Msheppard@gradcenter.cuny.edu

I'm Paola Gabriela Villa Paro, originally from the beautiful city of Cusco in the Peruvian Andes. I moved to Lima to study economics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), where I graduated summa cum laude. Since then, I’ve explored different areas of economics, helping set up one of Peru’s first experimental labs (LEEX at PUCP), managing financial inclusion fieldwork at IPA, and digging into complex datasets at CIUP for projects on pension systems in developing countries.

I later worked as a pre-doctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Public Finance Section, where I joined several research projects at different stages, an experience that taught me a lot about managing the research process from start to finish.

Now I’m in my second year of the Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Michigan. Lately, I’ve been especially enjoying my Public Finance and Industrial Organization classes, they’re a great mix of structure and policy insight that keep me thinking!

My research interests are shaped by a combination of hands-on experience as a research assistant and a deep personal curiosity. On the Public Finance side, I’m particularly interested in how individuals in highly informal economies make retirement decisions, and the implications of those choices for their short and long-term welfare. I’m also exploring how the interaction between corporate taxation, especially in key sectors like mining, and fiscal decentralization rules affects local tax collection, often with unintended or unequal consequences for resource-dependent regions.

On the Labor and Industrial Organization side, I study the redistributive effects of flexible labor regimes on workers’ lifetime expected utility. This is especially relevant in South America, where many countries adopted pro-business and labor flexibilization policies during the 2000s, reshaping employment dynamics and equity.

Finally, I have a personal and historically rooted interest in understanding intergenerational mobility resulting from Peru’s agrarian land reform. This project would involve archival and historical data work and, but it will help me to understand how large-scale historical policies shape inequality and opportunity across generations – like mine! 

Email:  villap@umich.edu

I’m Ria Wilken from Berlin, Germany. I’m a second-year PhD student in Economics at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University of Berlin, where I also work as a research assistant and teach, alongside working on my dissertation. Before that, I completed a B.Sc. in Business Administration and an M.Sc. in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Cologne, Germany. My experience as a student research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies sparked my interest in an academic career and ultimately led me to pursue a doctorate.

My research focuses on the causes of economic inequality and potential pathways toward more equitable societies, topics I find both intellectually and socially important. I’m excited to exchange ideas, collaborate with like-minded researchers, and learn from leading economists in the field during the summer school.

Outside academia, I ride road and gravel bikes competitively as part of a German racing team. I also enjoy visiting museums, baking cakes, and reading.

My research explores the long-term dynamics of economic inequality, focusing on how advantage is transmitted across generations through wealth, income, and housing. One project examines the persistence of wealth dynasties in the U.S. by linking historical Forbes rankings with full-count census data, exploring the roles of inheritance, marriage patterns, and family structures. Another investigates gender differences (between daugthers and sons) in intergenerational income mobility under varying household types, breadwinner roles, and policy environments. A third project compares historical housing segregation in Europe and the U.S. using GIS-based data, analyzing how urban form and development have shaped economic and ethnic divides over the past century.

Growing up in a working-class, non-academic female-breadwinning household has shaped my curiosity about how life chances are structured and reproduced. This perspective informs my broader interest in the interplay between wealth, mobility, and housing, and in the institutional and social mechanisms that sustain inequality across generations.

Email:  ria.wilken@fu-berlin.de

Hi! I am Pablo, a third-year PhD student in Economics at Princeton University. Originally from Argentina, I hold a BA and an MA in Economics from the Universidad de San Andrés. Before starting the PhD, I worked as a pre-doctoral Research Fellow at the EBRD.

My research interests are in Labor Economics. My current research focuses on the broad impact of remote work, where I am part of the Global Survey of Working Arrangements (G-SWA), a global survey which collects detailed information on workers’ experiences and attitudes regarding remote work arrangements. In ongoing work, I study the role of remote work in attenuating child penalties in Latin America. 

Beyond remote work, I am also exploring the long-term impact of early stage career decisions, as well as the role of pay transparency on labor market outcomes. 

Email:  pzarate@princeton.edu