LAUSR

As director of LIS, an international data archive and research center, Janet Gornick enables researchers to compare socioeconomic outcomes around the world, and to study the institutional factors that shape those outcomes I t has become a dominant theme in media reports: the rich are getting richer, while the poor are struggling— and often failing—to stay afloat. The attention follows four decades of increasing income inequality in the United States and across much of the world. And when the United Nations sought an authority to address the topic, it turned to Professor Janet Gornick. In October, Gornick, a professor of political science and sociology who also serves as the director of LIS, an international research institute, delivered a keynote address to the UN General Assembly. Her talk, " High and Rising Inequality: Causes and Consequences, " presented to senior delegates from 193 member states, was billed as the centerpiece of the opening of the General Assembly's work on economic and financial issues. The talk was informed by Gornick's work with LIS (formerly known as the Luxem-bourg Income Study), which is based in Luxembourg and has a satellite office at the Graduate Center; both are directed by Gor-nick, who joined the research institution in 1990 and recently expanded the satellite office by bringing in noted economists Branko Milanovic and Paul Krugman. LIS is a unique resource in the information world: it gathers datasets from many countries—now over 50—and harmonizes these data so that they can be meaningfully compared across nations and over time. LIS' " claim to fame " is its microdata: the records are available at the level of households and the persons in those households. A dataset might include tens of thousands of households , and, for each, detailed data are available on each person's earnings, as well as how much they receive in social benefits such as retirement pensions and unemployment insurance, and the amount of taxes paid. The datasets also include information on household members' gender, age, eth-nicity, partnership status, and level of education , as well as detailed data on each person's employment. (Names, Gornick notes, are not included.) These records are coded into an enormous database, which has been used by more than 5,000 researchers, students, and poli-cymakers, who can't get this information anywhere else. " You could go to the web-sites of organizations such as the World Bank or the International Labour Organization and …