Research

STEPHEN L. MORGAN is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Center for the Study of Inequality at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University in June of 2000, an M.Phil. from Oxford University in Comparative Social Research in May of 1995, and a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard University in June of 1993.

Morgan’s current areas of interest include social stratification, the sociology of education, and quantitative methodology. Much of his past substantive research has focused on educational institutions and outcomes. As part of this work, he has developed a new model of educational attainment based on a stochastic decision tree model of commitment. This work was published by Stanford University Press in 2005 as: On the Edge of Commitment: Educational Attainment and Race in the United States. He is also the lead editor (along with David Grusky and Gary Fields) of the collection Mobility and Inequality: Frontiers of Research from Sociology and Economics, also published by Stanford University Press in 2006.

In current projects, he has just completed a book with Christopher Winship, entitled Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in summer of 2007. He also continues to work on papers that examine changes in earnings and wealth inequality in the United States, and he is returning to the study of school effects on educational outcomes. Finally, he continues to analyze data on status attainment and patronage relations in Kano, Nigeria, based on data that he has collected with colleagues at the Bayero University of Kano. He is analyzing network data on reciprocated patronage relationships among all 659 household heads in Kofar Wambai.

Publications

For a complete list, see my CV.

Many of my publications can be accessed through my personal site.