David B. Grusky

A quantitative and empirical analyst of the changing structure of late-industrial inequality with a focus on such topics as (a) the role of rent-seeking and market failure in explaining the takeoff in income inequality, (b) the amount of economic and social mobility in the U.S. and other high-inequality countries, (c) the role of essentialism in explaining the persistence of extreme gender inequality, (d) the forces behind recent changes in the amount of face-to-face and online cross-class contact, and (e) the putative decline of big social classes and the persistence of occupation-based inequality.  He is also involved in projects to improve the country’s infrastructure for monitoring poverty, inequality, and mobility by exploiting administrative and other forms of big data more aggressively.  He founded two centers: the Center for the Study of Inequality at Cornell and the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford (which was one of three National Poverty Centers to be awarded funding by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services).