The Center for Inequality Dynamics (CID) has been relaunched as the The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics thanks to a $4 million gift from the Stone Foundation. The gift will help CID pursue foundational research on one changes and stability in socio-economic inequality, train the next generation of inequality scholars, expand the social science data infrastructure, and envision a more just world. Fabian Pfeffer, Associate Chair and Associate Professor in Sociology, serves as CID’s Director. [Learn more here]

The Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics (CID) has also received a $4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to map the unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity across the United States. The team -- which includes sociologists Fabian Pfeffer, Pablo Mitnik (Research Scientist at CID), Robert Manduca (Assistant Professor of Sociology), and Asher Dvir-Djerassi (Ph.D. Student in Sociology) -- will build a new data infrastructure that allows social scientists to study the geographic distribution of wealth, wealth inequality, and even its intergenerational persistence across the entire U.S.

By analyzing anonymized, individual-level IRS tax records in combination with other large administrative data sources, such as residential real estate property records, Fabian Pfeffer and his U-M colleagues and researchers at the Internal Revenue Service will create proxy measures of wealth for all U.S. taxpayers and link them across generations.

The Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics (CID) welcomed Pablo A. Mitnik as an Assistant Research Scientist in September. His research focuses on intergenerational mobility, economic inequality, social stratification, labor markets, and statistical methods. A large part of his recent work is aimed at improving the methodological approaches, statistical models, and data used to measure mobility and inequality of opportunity. His empirical research relies widely on tax and other administrative data. He obtained his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, and held several research positions at Stanford’s Center on Poverty and Inequality before joining CID.

The Stone Center also welcomed Nicole Bonomini as the new Engagement Manager to the team. She will co-develop CID’s communication vision and strategy and work to increase CID’s visibility across campus and to the broader public. Prior to joining ISR, Nicole worked in a variety of roles in marketing and communications with such brands as U-M, IBM, and Borders Books. Most recently, she worked on the communication team at the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research (MICHR).