The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality is located at the Vancouver School of Economics
As the first of its kind in Canada, The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality at UBC is poised to become a leading research hub on wealth inequality, significantly contributing to academic and public conversations. Its mission is to deepen our understanding of the forces shaping inequality in Canada and beyond.
“A key mission of the Stone Centre will be to promote the study of wealth inequality by helping access more detailed Canadian data, including individual income tax data, corporate tax data, Census data, and linked administrative data across various program areas of provincial jurisdiction,” said Dr. Thomas Lemieux, Stone Centre director and professor at the Vancouver School of Economics.
This commitment to robust data collection is echoed by Dr. David Green, Associate Director of the Stone Centre and professor at the Vancouver School of Economics, who highlights the challenges of working with wealth data: “At this point, there are good data series (and many good studies) on patterns and growth in income inequality and poverty in Canada. One of the key features of the Stone Centre will be to build a matching series on wealth inequality. This will take time since the data sources are harder to work with, but the resources given to the Centre will make it possible.”
“The Stone Centre will also be unique in Canada in presenting real-time updates on inequality movements for policymakers, other researchers, and the public to see. We view this as improving public and academic debate.”
Looking beyond data, the Stone Centre’s impact will be felt globally. By forming international partnerships and examining Canada’s position within global inequality dynamics, the Stone Centre aims to shape future policy and drive the conversation toward a more just and equitable society. “Research in the Canadian context can bridge insights from both Europe and the United States,” says Dr. Lemieux. “Canada’s unique position between the two regions, with a social safety net more extensive than the United States but less comprehensive than many European countries, enables comparative studies. Investigating inequality in Canada helps shed light on whether European policies could be effective in a U.S. context, facilitating a deeper understanding of the distribution of economic outcomes,” he adds.
Fellowship recipients of the Stone Centre’s inaugural 2024-25 cohort, with Stone Centre Directors Thomas Lemieux and Nicole Fortin.
To foster this international dialogue, the Stone Centre will host speakers, welcome visiting scholars, and establish a program supporting PhD students interested in comparative inequality research using rich administrative data from around the world.
The Stone Centre is also home to a diverse group of researchers whose work spans the many facets of inequality. We spoke with several Arts scholars who are conducting innovative research that addresses the impacts of wealth inequality and poverty on vulnerable communities.
Dr. Jiaying Zhao
Dr. Jiaying Zhao (she/her)
Dr. Zhao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at UBC. She is also a Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Sustainability and a UBC Sauder Distinguished Scholar.
How does your research engage with or impact communities directly affected by issues of wealth inequality, poverty, and/or homelessness?
I’ve been running randomized controlled trials with a local Vancouver charity called Foundations for Social Change since 2016 where we distribute a one-time unconditional cash transfer of around $8,000 to individuals experiencing homelessness in Vancouver. Our initial study has been published at PNAS where we demonstrate that the cash transfer reduced homelessness by 99 days and generated net savings for society in one year. We are currently running an expansion project to scale up the cash transfer to benefit more people. This research is only possible with a large number of community partners, including over 30 frontline organizations, Vancity, Telus, and the BC provincial government. An interesting aspect of this work is that most of our funding comes from private donations from high-net-worth donors and foundations within and outside Canada. While we still need more funding to complete the expansion project, I’m incredibly grateful for the voluntary contributions from so many philanthropists who care about inequality and want to do something to help the most vulnerable members of society.
Could you describe the main focus of your research related to wealth, poverty, and income inequality?
My main focus is to change policy by working with policymakers at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels to raise the income floor of people in poverty. For example, I’m working closely with Senator Kim Pate to advance her Bill S-233 which will establish a national framework for guaranteed liveable basic income for all Canadians. Meanwhile, I’m in discussions with several provinces and municipalities to design basic income demonstration projects to reduce poverty in Canada. A main barrier to poverty reduction is the insidious stereotypes the public holds against people in poverty, so I’m participating in an international mega-study to investigate interventions to promote public support for wealth redistribution policies to reduce income inequality.
Dr. Lindsey Richardson
Dr. Lindsey Richardson (she/her)
Dr. Richardson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, a Research Scientist at the BC Centre on Substance Use, and a Canada Research Chair in Social Inclusion and Health Equity.
How does your research engage with or impact communities directly affected by issues of wealth inequality, poverty, and/or homelessness?
Each disciplinary approach has distinct foundational concepts, assumptions, and frames of reference in terms of their scope and locus of action. When combined, complementary disciplines provide a more comprehensive understanding of why, what, and how to move forward in efforts to address poverty and its impacts.
I seek to position my research as a bridge between community and public policy, as well as a connection between the social forces at play in the production and entrenchment of poverty and the policy mechanisms that can mitigate or reduce the harms produced by those social forces. As such, I see my research as serving a translational function: examining what is happening, building evidence-informed approaches to change, and feeding data and research findings to the people who can learn from and use it, while ensuring that affected communities are integrated into the process.
Why is an interdisciplinary approach important and how can scholars from various disciplines contribute to the broader context of income inequality?
Interdisciplinary collaborations have been central—I draw on expertise from colleagues in economics, public health, occupational health, and public policy to complement my own sociological approaches. From how research questions are formulated, how research is designed and executed, and what is done with the results, my research is by design multi-modal and multi-disciplinary, and, I believe, stronger as a result.
“When combined, complementary disciplines provide a more comprehensive understanding of why, what, and how to move forward in efforts to address poverty and its impacts.”
Dr. Sylvia Fuller
Dr. Sylvia Fuller (she/her)
Dr. Fuller is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and has received numerous academic honours and prizes including the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada’s Aurora Prize.
Wealth and income inequality is a wicked problem with many interconnected aspects. Why is an interdisciplinary approach important and how can scholars from various disciplines contribute to the broader context of wealth inequality?
I come from Sociology, which is a pretty “big tent” discipline with a lot of variation in scholarly approaches. From this standpoint, it is easy to see the value of diverse perspectives when grappling with complex problems. While my own scholarship has largely been quantitative, I’ve found insights only possible from qualitative research enormously helpful in motivating and contextualizing my research. For example, my research with Yue Qian on parenthood, gender, and job loss was strongly influenced by earlier interview-based and ethnographic research by Sarah Damaske and Aliya Rao – and our research has fed into theirs in turn. Reaching further to cross disciplinary boundaries thus hasn’t felt like a huge stretch. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with political scientists, education scholars, and economists at key times in my career.
My postdoc with the political scientist Leah Vosko was foundational for developing a more sophisticated understanding of employment policy and regulations. More recently, I collaborated with an interdisciplinary group to develop and field a cross-national survey designed to map how parents’ care work and employment were shifting through the pandemic. The survey was stronger and more broadly useful because of our diverse backgrounds and perspectives.
Could you describe your current research onwealth, poverty, and income inequality?
My research explores the dark side of labour markets – dynamics that contribute to inequality and insecurity. Most of us rely on paid employment to get by. However, we do not always work on equal terms, or in ways that provide adequate economic security. Over the years, my research has explored a variety of topics related to employment inequalities, including research on temporary workers’ wage trajectories, factors shaping the divergence of career pathways among new immigrants, and how the pandemic impacted gendered employment gaps among parents.
While these studies looked at patterns in the labour market as a whole, I’ve also explored how organizational contexts matter for employment inequalities (i.e. the availability of flexible work, performance-based pay systems, formalization of employment relations, and the relationship between manager gender and the gender composition of the work-groups they supervise). Collaborating with scholars across Canada, I’m currently exploring how workplace policies and practices intersect with broader government employment, childcare, and parental leave policies to shape employment outcomes for diverse families in Canada. Ultimately, my research aims to shed light on the big questions of how we might restructure and reimagine employment relations and policy frameworks to create a more equitable and just future.
“Ultimately, my research aims to shed light on the big questions of how we might restructure and reimagine employment relations and policy frameworks to create a more equitable and just future.”
Dr. Thomas Lemieux
Dr. Thomas Lemieux (he/him)
Dr. Lemieux is a Professor at the Vancouver School of Economics and Director of the Stone Centre. His research revolves around the issue of earnings inequality in Canada and abroad.
Could you describe the main focus of your current research on wealth, poverty, and income inequality?
The focus of my current research is on how policies and institutions shape the distribution of income and wealth in Canada and abroad. All these projects are being conducted in collaboration with my VSE colleagues affiliated with the Stone Centre.
In the Canadian context, I have been looking at how increases in the minimum wage have some “ripple effects” on workers earning slightly more than the minimum. We find that these ripple effects enhance the inequality-reducing impact of the minimum wage by lifting up the wages among a particularly disadvantaged segment of the workforce. I am also studying how unions and collective bargaining influence the earnings of Canadian workers.
The empirical challenge is that unionized workplaces differ in many ways from non-unionized workplaces. Unionized workplaces tend to be larger, more concentrated in some industries like manufacturing, more profitable, and would have likely paid higher wages regardless of unionization status. The research leverages detailed longitudinal administrative data on workers and their firms to show that, after controlling for these factors, unions increase wages by about 10 percent and reduce wage inequality within workplaces.
Dr. David Green
Dr. David Green (he/him)
Dr. Green is a Professor at the Vancouver School of Economics and is an International Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. Recently, he also served as a chair for the BC Basic Income Panel.
Why is an interdisciplinary approach important and how can scholars from various disciplines contribute to the broader context of wealth inequality?
For me, a key question that we face in the broad area of inequality and policy is how do we create policy that moves Canada toward being a more just society. I would argue (as do others) that the strong focus of economics on questions of efficiency can serve to take us away from important debates on what constitutes a just society and how we work toward it. The Stone Centre’s interdisciplinary focus helps to bring together researchers with a broad set of approaches to questions related to justice. It provides a place where economists can truly engage with questions that we often don’t address directly. My research in recent years has consisted of an attempt to understand how questions about justice can shape applied, empirical research in economics on issues related to redistribution and wage setting.
