Branko Milanovic

Presidential Professor, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Branko Milanovic is Presidential Professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, as well as Senior Scholar at the Luxembourg Income Survey.

Previously, he served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group and as a visiting professor at the University of Maryland.

During his 25-year career as an economist, his main area of research has been income distribution. This gap was the subject of his 2011 book, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (Basic Books).

He likes to point out that his dissertation was on income inequality in the former socialist Yugoslavia, with the country disappearing four years after the dissertation was successfully defended. He moved on to studying income inequality during the transition in Eastern Europe, and with the integration of most of these countries into the European Union that specific topic disappeared as well.

After these projects, he dedicated himself to the study of income distribution on the worldwide level (as opposed to the distribution in one country or a group of countries).