 Well, I got started at a fairly young age. I am originally from Argentina. My family migrated to the United States and immediately, for me, it was pretty obvious how different the living standards were. In spite of the fact that Argentina was not among the poorest countries of the developing world by far, it was evident that there was a significant gap between people living in the United States, people living in Argentina, even the same people. Like my family. So it got me intrigued at that time, what's behind the fact that you have inequality between countries and then I got more and more interested in terms of also inequality within a country, which the US, as we know, has a lot of it too. That actually was one of the very surprising facts. The project that led to the first analysis of declining inequality, which was published in 2010. Now other things have come out since. When we started it, I used to be at UNDP and the idea was we wanted to focus on why inequality was persistently high and lo and behold, what we found is that inequality was falling in Latin America. The question was what had happened to make this occur in the region where we know that that was very unusual. Also in a context in which in the rest of the world inequality was rising in many parts both in the developed and the developing world. So we came up with two main reasons. We call them proximate reasons because there may be factors behind them that we still don't know exactly what they are. The two main reasons, one which we know that have played a role is the fact that government policy became more pro-poor. In particular the invention, if you want, of the cash transfers or the conditional cash transfers on a very large scale, which started in Mexico with what then used to be called progresa, and then a lot of other countries started to replicate, had a role to play in the decline in inequality. However, the most important factor that explains the decline in equality was the compression of real wages. In particular, what happened is that wages of people with higher education, with tertiary education, fell relatively to people with no or low education levels. That was a surprise. And in fact, more recently we also found that they not only fell relatively but also wages, real wages of people with tertiary education in some of the countries fell. That's true for Brazil and Mexico. What's behind that is still not clear. That's what I'm saying. The proximate causes we know that happened. But why did that happen is not entirely clear. Was it because you had an increase in the supply of people with tertiary education levels that went up faster than the demand for them? Or was it that there's been a change in the quality of what is now tertiary education so that the wages of people are receiving a new entrance to the labor force with tertiary education? The wages they receive are different from the similar people with tertiary education in the past. And we think there might be something in that part of the story because there was a large expansion of education. But with that expansion, what happened also is that more and more, if you want tertiary education institutions, were appearing and not all of them of the same quality. So I think there's been a deterioration of the quality of tertiary education, and that explains in part why the wages at the top have fallen. At the same time, you had an increase at the bottom. And there, we still also do not understand exactly what the reasons were, but one of them might have been that in some countries because of changes in demand patterns, people with lower skills were more in demand and their wages rose. Also in some countries, the minimum wages had something to do because the minimum wage was increased in countries like Brazil, Argentina. Even in Argentina, we had mandated wage increases in the private sector at the lower end of the wage spectrum. So those had a role to play in compressing the wage structure. And that is a core reason for the declining inequality in Latin America. This is actually currently one of the leading projects I'm involved in. And the idea is to use a common framework to do the analysis of the contribution of fiscal policy to the reduction or the change. It's not always a reduction to a change in inequality and poverty. So we use a technique which is known as fiscal incidence analysis. And we try to make it in a way so that we can compare across countries and also for one country over time. We started in Latin America, but now we have expanded to the entire world pretty much. And in the portfolio, there are 32 countries. We're about to have 18 of them finished. And we include in this portfolio even the biggest countries like China, India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa. We also have it on the US. So for Latin America, which was the first group of countries that we studied, I think that there are the two things that matter the most tend to be size. So how much you spend and progressivity. How progressive is a net fiscal system, meaning you cannot look at the tax side only. You cannot look at the spending side only, you have to look at both. And a combination of progressivity and pro-poorness, which is not exactly the same, a combination of progressivity and pro-poorness is what makes some of the systems more effective in reducing inequality and poverty. Problem is that what we discovered also is that it's very important not to look only at what people tend to look, which is personal income tax, or any other taxes that affect disposable income, but it's also important to see what happens when people spend. So consumption taxes are also important in analyzing the effect on poverty. And in some of the countries what we've found is that even though they may be incredibly successful in increasing people's money in their pocket, a lot gets taken away when people buy and have to pay consumption taxes. In fact, one of the cases is Brazil, which has these enormously successful Bolsa Familia program of cash transfers, but the basic goods are taxed at a very high level, rice and beans, for example. And therefore when people pay, when they consume, they pay to such an extent that for some of the poverty lines that we use when we make these kind of analysis, international poverty lines, but even the Brazilian ones that Brazil use, poverty is higher after taxes and transfers than market income poverty. So this was one of the findings that we have discovered occurs in more than one country and it gives you something to think about. So what's happening with the net fiscal system, even if some of the revenues are spent on public education and public health, you still don't want the poor to be poor in cash terms. And I think that's one of the messages we want to come out with. It's not so much a focus on inequality, it's a focus on absolute poverty and how your net fiscal system can be designed so you minimize that. And therefore even in countries where you have a lot of success in reducing inequality with the fiscal system, you may still have a problem of causing these increases in poverty which you want to vote, you want the fiscal not to create more poverty. Well I think that wider is one of the institutions that was pioneer in bringing people who are in academia from different parts of the world and think together under some sort of mentoring system in which you had a leader which is a renowned person in the field that helped do studies on very policy relevant issues. When I first came here I was just telling you was when wider was, right after wider was born and the study we were doing at the time was the successes and failures of stabilization policies in the developing world. It was after the debt crisis and this project was coordinated by Professor Lance Taylor who at that time was at MIT. And so it was a very, very nice way for people who you know at the time I was a scholar in Mexico where we were able not only to learn about the experiences in the rest of Latin America but there were people from Africa and Asia. And that created a network that I still use today. I still have that network as part of my professional life today and I'm sure that that's an experience that lots of people have had with wider as being a hub of bringing together researchers especially younger research from different parts of the world, bring them in a setting in which they have a mentoring system to work on policy relevant issues and creating lots of bridges and social capital that can be used during your entire life.