Dr Dirk Witteveen

Dirk's research focuses on higher education, wage-setting mechanisms within firms and markets, wealth stratification, racial and ethnic earnings inequalities, immigration, intergenerational social mobility, elitism, mental health, and incarceration. His projects often include a cross-national comparative angle. While Dirk primarily uses computational and other quantitative methods in his own research, he retains a broad and interdisciplinary interest in qualitative methods and social science theory.

Dirk's work in progress involves the role of social class compositions of workplaces in earnings inequality, racial-ethnic earnings inequalities in professional soccer, college wealth premia across high-income countries, institutional determinants of student loan debt, intergenerational social mobility in the Global South, college-occupation matching, the effect of loneliness on health, and the relationship between macro-economic conditions and occupational mobility gaps between immigrants and natives in the early 20th-century.

Dirk obtained a PhD in Sociology from the City University of New York (CUNY), the Graduate Center. He previously was a Postdoctoral Prize Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and a Departmental Lecturer in Sociology. His work has appeared in Social Forces, PNAS, Socio-Economic Review, Social Science Research, Sociology of Education, Work, Employment and Society, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, and Sociological Quarterly.

Dirk's publications can be found on Google Scholar.

Dirk can also be followed on X, Linkedin and Bluesky.