This file is my general research statement, written at a fairly high level of abstraction; this is part of my job market file. The first two chapters of my dissertation are out for review at the American Journal of Sociology and Social Indicators Research, respectively. See below for draft versions.

My research is centered on economic inequality in the United States, particularly income inequality. This inequality is particularly salient for both researchers and the broader public: it is an object of interest in its own right and has significant downstream effects on culture and politics. Somewhat surprisingly, given its prominence in the popular and academic press, there is a substantial lack of agreement among scholars about the basic facts of inequality. My dissertation addresses three particularly important areas of debate: the effects of different definitions of “income” on the measured level of income inequality, the effects of using different measures of inequality on this level, and the determinants of income inequality. My future research will follow this path: my ultimate goal is to synthesize some of these “local” debates about income inequality with the findings of broader methodological debates about what can (and cannot) be said about “decomposition” methods.

My dissertation has three closely interrelated parts; I re-open debates about US income inequality in three ways.

First, I show that relatively little research includes capital income in its analysis and instead focuses exclusively on labor-market sorting mechanisms (e.g. education, skills, exposure to offshoring or unionization); a simple coefficient of variation decomposition of income inequality using high-quality tax data shows that capital income generates the bulk of income inequality: differential ownership of property (i.e., differences in wealth). This fact has important theoretical implications: much research on inequality that has attempted to account for the role of property income has done so with the aid of a fixed map of social classes, and it has tended to become mired in debate. I demonstrate instead that a parsimonious conceptualization of “class” as a spectrum, defined by the extent of property ownership, allows us to avoid such debates and reveals a critical role for property income.

The second two chapters investigate some other reasons for this lacuna. First, I show that the definition of income itself, though hotly contested among economists, is rarely addressed by sociologists; I demonstrate systematically the marginal effects of various ways of defining income on inequality. In fact, most possible ways of extending the income concept generate sharper upward trends in inequality than if wages alone are used.

Finally, I demonstrate that sociologists have tended to miss the role of capital income because we tend to use inequality measures in an ad hoc fashion. In fact, a robust sub-literature on inequality measures has demonstrated that most common measures of inequality — e.g. the coefficient of variation, Theil index — can be treated as members of a family with an “inequality aversion” parameter. In effect, we can systematically talk about inequality measures as reflecting how averse we are to inequality and also how much we care about, say, inequality between persons around median income as opposed to inequality between the richest and poorest. Some measures, therefore, are especially sensitive to the income of the ultra-rich (and thus suggest a large role for property income), while others are not (and suggest a larger role for labor-market mechanisms; the Gini coefficient, often used without thorough justification, has this property).

As of this writing, my first chapter is under review at the American Journal of Sociology and my second chapter is under review at Social Indicators Research. I will submit the third chapter to Sociological Methodology in the near future. I presented the first chapter at the ASA Regular Session on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility in 2024, for which I won the Wisconsin Scholarship Hub (WISH) Student Research Grants Competition Travel Award. This paper was also accepted for an oral presentation and won a Travel Award from RC28 in 2026. I am presenting the second chapter at a roundtable at ASA in 2026.

In my future research, I plan to expand on the third chapter of my dissertation. I am particularly interested in developing systematically the link between the unified framework for decomposition analysis based on the Shapley approach [@shorrocks2013] and recent research by scholars working in the potential outcomes framework [@elwert2025]. Scholars in the latter tradition have developed a robust framework for identifying causal effects in the (ubiquitous) situation where assignment to a treatment is non-random, while scholars in the former tradition have focused their attention on the problem of assigning a given factor a particular “contribution” to inequality, depending on the inequality measure and model used. These traditions have developed largely in isolation from one another but address fundamentally similar problems: when is it possible to say that factor $X$ actually “explains” some outcome $Y$, and when is this illusory? The causal identification framework can be brought to bear fruitfully on the slightly older but important literature on inequality decomposition.

Finally, I should note the connection of my research to my teaching. I am an especially teaching-focused scholar, and my research is closely tied to my pedagogy. As a lecturer, I am particularly keen on helping students understand statistical methods, and methodology more generally, from the ground up: I have been successful in helping students come to see why certain fundamentals are true and why so much debate exists among scholars about essentially everything but those fundamentals. In my own research, I have found my niche by leaning into this uncertainty: my full dissertation developed from the lengthy appendix attached to my first paper, which was essentially a set of running notes I kept on all of the many contestable elements of my major substantive paper. Just as I ask, and receive, a great deal of curiosity from my students, I have identified active areas of debate by asking myself questions and realizing that the jury is still out.