Stephen L. Morgan

Stephen L. Morgan is the Jan Rock Zubrow '77 Professor in the Social Sciences at Cornell University, the Director of the Center for the Study of Inequality, and an Associate Director of the Cornell Population Center. He received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University, an M.Phil. in Comparative Social Research from Oxford University, and a B.A. in Sociology from Harvard University.

Beyond Cornell, he is a member of the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey and the Socioeconomic Status Experts Panel, convened by the U.S. Department of Education to develop a new measure of socioeconomic status for federal reporting of the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing program, often referred to as The Nation's Report Card.

His current areas of research include education, inequality, demography, and methodology. In addition to journal articles on these topics, he has published two books: On the Edge of Commitment: Educational Attainment and Race in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2005) and, co-written with Christopher Winship, Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

His recent writing includes an article on the methodological challenges of estimating models of college entry (Sociological Methods and Research, 2012), a chapter, co-written with Jennifer Todd and Michael Spiller, on the primary and secondary effects of family background on educational attainment in the United States (in Determined to Succeed? Performance versus Choice in Educational Attainment [Stanford University Press, 2012], edited by Michelle Jackson), a chapter, co-written with Christopher Winship, on context and variability in causal analysis (in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences [Oxford University Press, 2012], edited by Harold Kincaid), and an article, co-written with Emily Taylor Poppe, on the effects of international competitiveness framing of policy options on support for K-12 schools (forthcoming in Educational Researcher). For 2012-13, he will be focusing, along with Christopher Winship, on writing a second edition of Counterfactuals and Causal Inference.

[Links to these publications and others can be found on the publications page of this website.]