Simeon Djankov, Ph.D.,

Director of the Financial Markets Group at the London School of Economics

Dr. Djankov is the Director of the Financial Markets Group at the London School of Economics and a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Dr Djankov was Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance of Bulgaria from 2009 to 2013. Prior to his cabinet appointment, Dr. Djankov was chief economist of the finance and private sector vice presidency of the World Bank. In his 14 years at the Bank, he worked on regional trade agreements in North Africa, enterprise restructuring and privatization in transition economies, corporate governance in East Asia, and regulatory reforms around the world. He is the founder of the World Bank’s Doing Business project. He is author of Inside the Euro Crisis: An Eyewitness Account (2014) and principal author of the World Development Report 2002. He is also coeditor of The Great Rebirth: Lessons from the Victory of Capitalism over Communism (2014).

Previously he was rector of the New Economic School in Russia and a visiting lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He was associate editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics from 2004 to 2009 and chairman of the Board of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 2012–13. He is also a member of the Knowledge and Advisory Council at the World Bank. He has published over 70 articles in professional journals. He obtained his doctorate in economics in 1997 from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

James J. Heckman

Senior Fellow Archbridge Institute

James J. Heckman has devoted his professional life to understanding the origins of major social and economic problems related to inequality, social mobility, discrimination, skill formation and regulation, and to devising and evaluating alternative strategies for addressing those problems. His work is rooted in economics, but he actively collaborates across disciplines to get to the heart of major problems. His recent interdisciplinary research on human development and skill formation over the life cycle draws on economics, psychology, genetics, epidemiology, and neuroscience to examine the origins of inequality, the determinants of social mobility, and the links among stages of the life cycle, starting in the womb.

Heckman has a BA (1965) in Mathematics from Colorado College and an MA (1968) and PhD (1971) in Economics from Princeton University. He has been at the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago since 1973. He was one of the founders of the Harris School of Public Policy, where he also has an appointment. Since 1991, he has been a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation and also holds an appointment at the Law School at the University of Chicago. In May 2014, he launched the Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago which he directs.

In 2000, Heckman shared the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the microeconometrics of diversity and heterogeneity and for establishing a sound causal basis for public policy evaluation. He has received numerous other awards for his work, including the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 1983, the Jacob Mincer Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005 from the Society of Labor Economics, the 2005 and 2007 Dennis Aigner Award for Applied Econometrics from the Journal of Econometrics, the Ulysses Medal from the University College Dublin in 2006, the 2007 Theodore W. Schultz Award from the American Agricultural Economics Association, the Gold Medal of the President of the Italian Republic, awarded by the International Scientific Committee of the Pio Manzú Centre in 2008, the Distinguished Contributions to Public Policy for Children Award from the Society for Research in Child Development in 2009, and the Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society in 2014 for the most outstanding paper in applied economics published in Econometrica in the previous five years. He is a recent recipient of a NIH MERIT award.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA; a member of the American Philosophical Society; a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the Econometric Society; the Society of Labor Economics; the American Statistical Association; the International Statistical Institute; and the National Academy of Education. He has received numerous honorary degrees, most recently from University College London in 2013, and is a foreign member of Academica Sinica and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He has published over 300 articles and 9 books. His most recent book is The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2014). He is actively engaged in conducting and guiding empirical and theoretical research on skill development, inequality, and social mobility

Steven N. Durlauf

Senior Fellow Archbridge Institute

Steven Durlauf is an Associate Director at the Center for the Economics of Human Development. He is also a Professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School for Public Policy. Durlauf’s research spans many topics in microeconomics and macroeconomics. His most important substantive contributions involve the areas of poverty, inequality and economic growth. Much of his research has attempted to integrate sociological ideas into economic analysis. His major methodological contributions include both economic theory and econometrics. He helped pioneer the application of statistical mechanics techniques to the modelling of socioeconomic behavior and has also developed identification analyses for the empirical analogs of these models. Other research has focused on techniques for monetary policy evaluation. Durlauf is also known as a critic of the use of the concept of social capital by economists and other social scientists and has also challenged the ways that agent-based modelling and complexity theory have been employed by social and natural scientists to study socioeconomic phenomena.

Prior to joining Harris, he was the William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Durlauf is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has held previous positions at Stanford University; University of California, Los Angeles; Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro; the Santa Fe Institute; and Federal Reserve, among others.

Durlauf graduated magna cum laude with a BA in economics from Harvard in 1980. He went on to earn his doctorate from Yale in 1986.

Scott Winship, Ph.D.

Honorary Adviser

Dr. Scott Winship is an honorary adviser to the Archbridge Institute. Previously, he was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the Brookings Institution. Scott’s research interests include living standards and economic mobility, inequality, and insecurity. Earlier, he was research manager of the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts and a senior policy advisor at Third Way. Scott writes a column for Forbes.com; his research has been published in City Journal, National Affairs, National Review, The Wilson Quarterly, and Breakthrough Journal; and he contributed an essay on antipoverty policy to the ebook Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and a Thriving Middle Class (2014). He has testified before Congress on poverty, inequality, and joblessness. He holds a B.A. in sociology and urban studies from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in social policy from Harvard University.