Professors Anita Alves Pena and Daniele Tavani,  have been invited to contribute a paper to the upcoming National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Workshop on the Economics of Race and Stratification in October. The NBER, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the most prominent research institute in economics worldwide, best known for defining U.S. business cycles and for circulating the working papers that shape the field. This highly selective workshop brings together leading scholars to advance research on inequality and social stratification.

In joint work with Alan Aja (CUNY) and Mary Lopez (Occidental College), Dr. Pena will present a comprehensive framework for thinking about group inequality from a global perspective.  In their work, Aja, Lopez, and Pena are synthesizing literature across countries, regions, and historical periods that highlights both shared and varied factors of intergenerational mobility, economic opportunity, and wealth inequality that inform strategies for reducing disparities.

Dr. Tavani, jointly with CSU alumn Brendan Brundage (Morehouse) and Dan McGee (University of Toronto), will present a paper summarizing and extending recent theoretical work on strategic discrimination in economics, to which the authors are prominent contributors. The paper highlights the importance of bringing stratification economics into mainstream economics modeling, discusses the state of the art in this research, and outlines several areas for further inquiry. 

Professors Pena’s and Tavani’s participation to the workshop highlights both the visibility of CSU’s economics department and the college’s engagement with cutting-edge national and international research.