Julien Lafortune is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, where he specializes in education and economics. He is also a member of the PPIC Economic Policy Center. His primary areas of focus include K–12 education finance, school infrastructure, human capital, and labor market policy. He has authored policy reports, briefs, presentations, and blogs on a variety of policy topics, including K–12 education, labor market issues, demographics, and housing markets. He has academic published research papers on school finance reforms and school capital investments in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and the American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Emmanuel Prunty is a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California, where he focuses on K–12 education policy. Since joining PPIC, he has worked on topics such as distance learning, transitional kindergarten, and declining enrollment during the pandemic. Previously, he interned at the Hutchins Center at the Brookings Institution and served as a graduate student instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in economics and ethnic studies, and minored in demography.