Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group

Founded in 2010, HCEO is a network of over 500 global scholars, educators and policy makers focused on human capital development and its impact on opportunity inequality. HCEO’s unique approach enables collaboration among academics with varying disciplines, approaches, perspectives and fields. HCEO integrates biological, sociological, and psychological perspectives into traditionally economic questions. The result is innovative thinking and approaches to inequality and human capital development research.
Each summer, HCEO partners with international institutions to host student training seminars around the world as a part of its Summer School on Socioeconomic Inequality Series (SSSI). The summer school is designed to provide a state-of-the-art overview of the study of inequality and human flourishing. Participants learn about integrating psychological and sociological perspectives into conventional economic models to understand the foundations of human behavior. Students are exposed to tools needed to study the dynamic processes that produce conditions of inequality and ways to address them. During the one week, intensive program, students attend daily lectures, engage in discussions, and have opportunities to present their work to leading scholars and peers. HCEO summer school programs have been held in Russia, Germany, China, England, Norway, and the United States.
Over the past 8 years, HCEO has developed strong partnerships with institutions around the world. Key partners include: The Institute for Behavior and Inequality (briq) at the University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany; the Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality, and Rationality (FAIR) at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen, Norway; the Institute for Economic and Social Research (IESR) at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China; the Research Institute of Economics and Management (RIEM) at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, China; Beijing Normal University in Beijing, China; and the New Economic School in Moscow Russia.
In addition to these partnerships, HCEO’s parent organization, the Center for the Economics of Human Development, has established a Joint Center with the Institute for Economic and Social Research at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China in 2018. This strategic partnership promotes scholarship through collaborative conferences and workshops, faculty and researcher visits, joint research projects, and an international fellow program. CEHD and IESR offer joint positions for full-time research staff and post-doctoral scholars who divide their time at both institutions.