Masoud Movahed

Specialization:

Quantitative & Computational Methods, Spatial Methods, Social Stratification, Economic Sociology, Political Sociology, Income & Wealth Inequality, Comparative & Historical Methods

Education:

Ph.D., University of Wisconson - Madison

Bio:

My research lies at the nexus of social stratification, economic and political sociology. It integrates computational and quantitative methods with those of comparative historical methods in order to investigate the social-structural and institutional determinants of income and wealth inequality, both cross-nationally and within the U.S. context. More specifically, my research draws on panel data analysis, spatial econometrics, and machine learning tools—including both unsupervised clustering techniques and supervised learning algorithms. While I employ computational methods, I retain a keen interest in comparative-historical methods, particularly event structure analysis (ESA), sequence analysis, and process tracing. More recently, I have been part of collaborative projects that use survey experiments in U.S. contexts, alongside work in computational text analysis focusing on topic modeling and sentiment analysis.

My papers have been published in Social Science Research, Journal of Industrial Relations, Spatial Demography, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Journal of International Development, The Sociological Quarterly, and Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements. Beyond academic research, I also contribute essays and commentary to public-facing outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Boston Review, World Economic Forum, Harvard International Review, Yale Journal of International Affairs, and Al Jazeera.

My research has won awards from various sections of the American Sociological Association, including the Mathematical Sociology, Political Economy of the World-System Section, and Sociology of Development. I have also received the Sabina Avdagic Early Career Scholar Prize from the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE).  I hold an M.A. from New York University and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania.