Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality

The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality is a nonpartisan research center dedicated to monitoring trends in poverty and inequality, explaining what’s driving those trends, and developing science-based policy on poverty and inequality. The Center, a program of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, supports research by new and established scholars, trains the next generation of scholars and policy analysts, and disseminates the very best research on poverty and inequality. The Director of the Center is David B. Grusky, and the Associate Director is Charles Varner.

Pathways Magazine

The Center publishes Pathways Magazine, an online and print magazine that reports on trends in poverty and inequality, summarizes cutting-edge research, evaluates key interventions, develops bold visions for the future, and stages debates among top commentators. At the beginning of each year, the Center publishes a special “State of the Union” issue of Pathways Magazine devoted to summarizing and making sense of recent developments in poverty, mobility, inequality, segregation, and other key outcomes. 

California Longitudinal Administrative Database

The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality aims to improve the country’s infrastructure for evaluating and developing evidence-based policy on poverty and inequality. With support from Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the James Irvine Foundation, the Center is building the California Longitudinal Administrative Database (“CLAD”), which will link decennial Census data, American Community Survey data, and California tax return data. The purpose of CLAD is to monitor trends in poverty and labor market outcomes, evaluate federal, state, and local poverty and mobility policies, and develop new poverty and mobility policies by simulating their effects on key outcomes of interest.

National Poverty Study

The National Poverty Study will provide the country’s first systematic qualitative evidence on how people are experiencing and coping with poverty. It will represent the many different types of poverty across the country (e.g., suburban, rural, deindustrializing, urban, immigrant, reservation); it will allow policy to be tailored to these types and thus reveal where one-size-fits-all policy is failing; it will allow the country to develop poverty thresholds that reflect actual conditions on the ground; and it will provide an early warning system of emerging problems in the low-income population.

Poverty and Technology Lab

The Stanford Poverty and Technology Lab is dedicated to building new products that exploit the capacity of technology to reduce poverty. The lab, which brings together teams of students, faculty, and Silicon Valley leaders, will build such technology-driven innovations as one-stop centers for poverty-reducing programs and services, job referral and connective services for low-wage and low-skill labor, and interventions that increase and improve information about opportunities for adults and children. The no-holds-barred objective: To develop a suite of ambitious “Silicon Valley” anti-poverty interventions that change the face of poverty in the Bay Area, the U.S., and beyond.