EQUITABLE GROWTH - Key Persons

Adam Reich

Job Titles:

Associate Professor of Sociology
Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University

Adam Reich is an associate professor of sociology at Columbia University and a faculty affiliate at Columbia's Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics. His research focuses on three institutions that jointly structure the life chances and permeate the lives of millions of Americans today: the healthcare system, the criminal justice system, and the low-wage labor market. Reich is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart (Columbia University Press, 2018), co-authored with Peter Bearman. He is also the author of several peer-reviewed articles, which have appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Social Science & Medicine, Socio-Economic Review, and Industrial and Labor Relations Review. Reich received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society scholar at Columbia University from 2012 to 2014.

Adrian Narayan

an..@equitablegrowth.org

Job Titles:

Associate at the Washington Center
Government and External Relations Associate / Washington Center
Staff

Adrian Narayan is the government and external relations associate at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Prior to joining Equitable Growth, Narayan served as a field representative and legislative aide to Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), advising the congresswoman on a diverse range of public policy issues throughout California's 45th congressional district. He previously worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Los Angeles as an assistant to the president, where he was actively engaged with community stakeholder development and organized outreach programs to increase local voter registration. He has also held positions with former California Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas (D), California State Controller Betty Yee, Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), and the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles. Narayan received a bachelor's degree in political science and gender studies from Loyola Marymount University.

Aidah Johnson

aj..@equitablegrowth.org

Job Titles:

Senior Accounting Manager / Washington Center
Senior Accounting Manager at the Washington Center
Staff

Aidah Johnson is the senior accounting manager at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Johnson has more than 18 years of operations, accounting, and finance experience. Prior to joining Equitable Growth, Johnson worked in the public relations, marketing, and healthcare industries. In addition to her professional experience, she brings with her an accounting degree and numerous certificates.

Aixa Alemán-Díaz

Job Titles:

Program Manager
Program Manager, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion / American Geophysical Union

Aixa Alemán-Díaz is a program manager of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the American Geophysical Union. Previously, she was a Mellon/ACLS public fellow and an engagement project manager at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Her research examines senses of place, issues of access, and the multiple uses of coasts, including public and protected areas, among residents of Puerto Rico, a society marked by inequality. Alemán-Díaz pursued her B.A., a double major in psychology and anthropology, at the University of Michigan, and upon graduation, she completed a year at the National Institutes of Health conducting social and behavioral research. She holds a Ph.D. from American University and a M.A. from Rutgers University in sociocultural anthropology.

Alan S. Blinder

Job Titles:

Member of the Steering Committee

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez

Job Titles:

Associate Professor

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a visiting fellow at Equitable Growth. His teaching and research focuses on understanding the intersection between politics and markets in the United States, the politics of policy design, and labor policy. He is co-director of Columbia's Labor Lab, which uses social science tools in partnership with labor organizations to build worker power. Hertel-Fernandez recently returned to Columbia after serving in the Biden-Harris Administration in the U.S. Department of Labor and the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. While at the Department of Labor, he led research and evaluation to support policymaking, including launching initiatives to study and address disparities in access to Unemployment Insurance; build a research base to understand how to improve worker power and organizing across the federal government; and to better measure job quality. He also led the department's implementation of President Joe Biden's historic executive order on racial equity. At the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Hertel-Fernandez led efforts to expand public participation and community engagement in the regulatory process, reduce burdens in access to government benefits, and served as the lead handling White House review of regulations and forms related to nutrition and food assistance, support for underserved farmers, and rural development. Hertel-Fernandez is the author or co-author of three books, including most recently The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power (Cambridge, 2021, with Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson, and Kathleen Thelen), which lays out a new framework for assessing the evolution of distinctive political and economic institutions in the United States in comparative perspective. His previous book, State Capture (Oxford, 2019), examined how wealthy donors, businesses and trade associations, and political entrepreneurs built cross-state organizations to reshape policy across the United States-with implications for democracy, accountability, inequality, and political representation. His first book, Politics at Work (Oxford, 2018), examined changing patterns of political mobilization in the workplace. Hertel-Fernandez received his B.A. in political science from Northwestern University and his A.M. and Ph.D. in government and social policy from Harvard University.

Alix Gould-Werth

Alix Gould-Werth is the former director of family economic security policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Prior to joining Equitable Growth, she was a human services researcher at Mathematica Policy Research. Gould-Werth holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from Swarthmore College. Her work focuses on poverty and inequality and has been published in Monthly Labor Review, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Social Service Review, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Survey Practice.

Amir Sufi

Job Titles:

Bruce Lindsay Professor of Economics and Public Policy / University of Chicago
Member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth 's Research Advisory Board

Amir Sufi is a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth's Research Advisory Board. He is also the Bruce Lindsay Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves as an associate editor for the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Sufi's research focuses on finance and macroeconomics. He has articles published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. His recent research on household debt and the economy has been profiled in The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. It has also been presented to policymakers at the Federal Reserve; the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; and the White House Council of Economic Advisers. This research forms the basis of his book, co-authored with Atif Mian, House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014. Sufi graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University with a bachelor's degree in economics. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the Solow Endowment Prize for Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching and Research. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 2005.

Ariel Kalil

Job Titles:

Member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth 's Research Advisory Board
Professor and Director of the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy / University of Chicago

Ariel Kalil, a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth's Research Advisory Board, is a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. At Harris, she directs the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy and co-directs the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab. She also holds appointments as an adjunct professor in the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen, Norway, and in the School of Business Administration at the University of Stavanger, Norway. She is a developmental psychologist who studies economic conditions, parenting, and child development. Her current research examines the historical evolution of income-based gaps in parenting behavior and children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. In addition, at the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab, she is leading a variety of field experiments designed to strengthen parental engagement and child development in low-income families using tools drawn from behavioral economics and neuroscience. Kalil received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Michigan. Before joining the Harris faculty in 1999, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan's National Poverty Center. Kalil has received the William T. Grant Foundation Faculty Scholars Award, the Changing Faces of America's Children Young Scholars Award from the Foundation for Child Development, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, and in 2003, she was the first-ever recipient of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Award for Early Research Contributions. Her current work is funded by NIH and by a number of private foundations.

Arindrajit Dube

Job Titles:

Member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth 's Research Advisory Board

Arindrajit Dube, a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth's Research Advisory Board, is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor. Dube's work focuses on labor economics, health economics, public finance, and political economy. Some of his current areas of research include minimum wage policies, effects of unions, monopsony in the labor market, firm wage policies, and fairness concerns at the workplace. Dube received his Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and Master of Arts in development policy from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.

Atif Mian

Job Titles:

Member of the Steering Committee
Member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth 's Steering Committee
Steering Committee

Atif Mian is a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth's Steering Committee, the John H. Laporte, Jr. Class of 1967 professor of economics, public policy, and finance at Princeton University, and director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Prior to joining Princeton in 2012, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His current work focuses on the deeper implications of rising inequality for the macroeconomy-including growth, financial markets, monetary policy and fiscal policy. His 2014 book, House of Debt, with Amir Sufi builds upon powerful new data to describe how debt precipitated the Great Recession. The book explains why debt continues to threaten the global economy and what needs to be done to fix the financial system. House of Debt is critically acclaimed by the New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The Atlantic, among others. Mian's research has appeared in top academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of Financial Economics. Mian holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics with computer science and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Austin Clemens

ac..@equitablegrowth.org

Job Titles:

Senior Fellow / Washington Center
Senior Fellow at the Washington Center

Austin Clemens is a senior fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Prior to joining Equitable Growth, Austin was an assistant research scientist at the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University where he researched criminal justice policy. Clemens holds a bachelor's in economics from the University of Texas and a doctorate in political science from the University of Georgia. His work has appeared in ESPN the Magazine, Smithsonian magazine, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Business and Politics.

Ben Zipperer

Ben Zipperer was a Research Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. His research focused on the minimum wage and other labor standards, measuring how specific labor market policies affect the income distribution, productivity, and employment. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Georgia.

Byron Auguste - CEO, Founder

Job Titles:

CEO
Co - Founder
Member of the Steering Committee
Member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth 's Steering Committee

Byron Auguste is a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth's Steering Committee and is the CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit organization that seeks to expand access to career opportunities so that all Americans can work, learn, and earn to their full potential in a dynamic economy. Prior to co-founding Opportunity@Work, Auguste served for 2 years in the White House as deputy assistant to President Barack Obama for economic policy and deputy director of the National Economic Council, where his policy portfolio included job creation and labor markets, skills and workforce policies, innovation, investment, infrastructure, transportation, and goods movement. Until 2013, Auguste was a senior partner at McKinsey & Company in Washington, DC, and in Los Angeles, where he was elected principal in 1999 and director in 2005. He also served as a member of the boards of trustees of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Yale University. He is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy, and he serves on the boards of Hope Street Group and Opportunity@Work. Auguste earned a B.A. summa cum laude in economics and political science from Yale University, where he was awarded a Truman Scholarship and the James Gordon Bennet Prize, and he holds an M.Phil. and D.Phil. in economics from Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar.

Carmen Sanchez Cumming

Carmen Sanchez Cumming was a research associate at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Prior to joining Equitable Growth, Sanchez Cumming was a campaigns assistant at Oxfam America and research assistant at Middlebury College's Department of Sociology. Her interests are in labor market policy, wage inequality, and market concentration. Sanchez Cumming holds a B.A. in economics and sociology from Middlebury College.

Catherine Wolfram

Job Titles:

Member of the Steering Committee

Colleen Harwood

Job Titles:

Staff

Daron Acemoglu

Job Titles:

Member of the Steering Committee

David Evans

de..@equitablegrowth.org

Job Titles:

Creative Director

David S. Mitchell

Job Titles:

Director of Government and External Relations
Staff

Ed Paisley

ep..@equitablegrowth.org

Job Titles:

Staff

Elena Waskey

Job Titles:

Staff

Emmanuel Saez

Job Titles:

Member of the Steering Committee

Gina Salerno

Job Titles:

Staff

Gordon S. Rentschler

Job Titles:

Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs / Princeton University

Alan S. Blinder is the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. He is also a regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a member of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth's Steering Committee. In addition to his time in academia, Blinder previously served as a member of President Bill Clinton's original Council of Economic Advisers, and then as vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He is the author or co-author of 23 books, including the textbook Economics: Principles and Policy, now in its 14 th edition (with William Baumol and John Solow), from which more than 3 million college students have learned introductory economics. Blinder's best-selling book, After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead, has also won several awards, and in 2011, he was elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. Blinder earned his A.B. at Princeton University, his M.Sc. at the London School of Economics, and his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-all in economics.