The Stone Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality at UBC is a new research centre at the Vancouver School of Economics funded by a generous gift of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation. Its purpose is to support research on the causes and consequences of wealth and income inequality, and possible remedies.
Established in 2024 with a generous $5.4 million gift from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation, the Stone Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality at UBC’s Vancouver School of Economics joins a prestigious network of eleven global institutions committed to advancing research, teaching, and knowledge mobilization around wealth inequality. Led by esteemed economists Dr. Thomas Lemieux, Dr. Nicole Fortin, and Dr. David Green, the Stone Centre deepens our understanding of the causes and consequences of wealth concentration, providing valuable insights to foster a more equitable society. The Stone Centre supports cutting-edge research, offers fellowships and grants, and collaborates with Statistics Canada to develop comprehensive datasets on wealth and income inequality across the country.
Meet the Directors
Thomas Lemieux
Thomas’ work has shown that collective bargaining, minimum wages, and educational achievement were key determinants of earnings inequality in Canada and abroad. He has also studied the evolution of income and wealth at the top end of the distribution, highlighting differences between factors shaping inequality in different parts of the distribution. He is also well known for developing new empirical methods to decompose changes and differences in inequality.
Nicole Fortin
Nicole’s expertise in the causes of inequality has focused on the role of labour market institutions and public policies. Her contributions to decomposition methods, the widely known DFL reweighting decomposition, and the RIF regression methodologies are now commonly used to apportion different factors of interest to changes in a range of inequality measures from percentile ratios to the Gini. She teaches these methods to VSE graduate students and Stone fellows.
David Green
David’s research focuses on the determinants of wage and employment structures, with significant contributions to understanding wage inequality, minimum wage policies, and labour market dynamics. He has bridged macro and micro labour economics to address general equilibrium effects and identification issues. Recently, David chaired the BC Basic Income Panel, leading extensive research on the viability of a basic income pilot project. His work continues to shape policy discussions and economic research both locally and internationally.
“The growing concentration of income and wealth poses a central challenge to countries like Canada that strive to grow their economies in a just and equitable way. Joined in partnership with a generous gift from the Stone Foundation, we are establishing a new research hub at UBC to help advance our knowledge of the causes and consequences of growing inequality in Canada and abroad. Here, we will train the next generation of scholars by moving economic inequality to the forefront of their graduate education in economics.”
Thomas Lemieux, Stone Centre Director
James M. and Cathleen D. Stone
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation is dedicated to fostering a more informed and equitable society. With a primary focus on addressing wealth inequality, the centre engages in rigorous quantitative research to illuminate the multifaceted dynamics of societal, economic, and political structures. The foundation has made significant investments worldwide in the study and mitigation of wealth inequality, with emphasis on the causes and consequences of wealth accumulating at the top. This latest investment places UBC among an esteemed cohort of leading global institutions—including Harvard University, Brown University, and University of California, Berkeley.
“Accelerating wealth inequality represents a threat to the future of our societies. Cathy and I are committed to funding scholarship on the causes and consequences of extreme inequality. UBC’s rich, interdisciplinary research and demonstrated commitment to this research area were key drivers in our selection of the Vancouver School of Economics for a center. We look forward to supporting the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Centre for Wealth and Income Inequality over the coming years.“
James M. Stone