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£5m donation to UCL will create a new centre on wealth concentration, inequality and the economy

29 September 2021

The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation has made a £5 million ($7 million) donation to UCL, to establish the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Centre on Wealth Concentration, Inequality and the Economy, based in the Department of Economics.

rich and poor signs

The mission of the Stone Centre at UCL is to advance research and teaching to provide a clear understanding of the causes of wealth inequality, and its economic and political consequences. 

It pairs up the CORE (Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics) project which is changing economics education globally to a focus on the most important problems faced by our societies, with the research powerhouse of UCL Department of Economics. It will provide a global hub for research and learning that will make wealth concentration and its impacts on innovation and sustainability central to an economics education. 

The Centre will work closely with UCL’s new Policy Lab (a collaboration between Economics and Political Science) to take the research findings, policy advice and new educational resources to a wide audience including policy makers, journalists and public and private sector leaders. 

The co-directors of the Centre are Wendy Carlin, Professor of Economics and Founding Director of the CORE project and Imran Rasul, Professor of Economics and Co-director of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at IFS. 

Thanking Jim and Cathy Stone, Dr Michael Spence, UCL President & Provost, said: 

“The pandemic has brought the issue of economic equality and wealth distribution into sharp focus and tackling economic inequalities and their impacts will be a core part of building a fairer post-Covid world globally. This is an extremely timely intervention and will be a transformative addition to UCL’s work to advance equality and social justice in the UK and worldwide. I’m delighted to see the Centre established here and am hugely grateful to Jim and Cathy Stone for their generosity, vision and ambition.” 

The Department of Economics is a hub for world-class economists situated within a thriving academic community at UCL, right in the heart of London. Founded in 1826 with one of the first Chairs in Economics, the department continues to push the frontier in all areas of economics research. 

 

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