My name is Masoud Movahed and I am Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

I completed my doctoral studies in Sociology (with a minor in Public Affairs) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to that, I also completed an M.A. in Development Economics at New York University. Broadly, my interests lie at the nexus of social stratification, economic and political sociology.

Most of my works use computational and quantitative methods, but I retain a keen interest for comparative historical methods. My dissertation entitled “Varieties of Capitalism, Income Inequality, and Mobility,” draws on cross-national panel data for much of the post World War II era to explain why some countries are more egalitarian than others. One of the its chapters, shifts the focus to the United States, where  I draw on explicitly spatial models to parameterize spatial dependence in the intergenerational income mobility dataacross US places. The first paper of my dissertation published in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology won multiple awards from the American Sociological Association. The awards include:

1. Honorable Mention for the 2024 ASA Sociology of Development Award for Best Article.

2. Political Economy of the World System’s Terence K. Hopkins Article Award 

My works have been published in the Social Science Research,  International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Journal of International Development, multiple articles in Sociological Quarterly (second article: Sociological Quarterly), Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements, Harvard International Review, Foreign Affairs, and Boston Review. 

I have also written public sociology articles and Op-Eds in the Harvard Economics Review, World Economic Forum, Yale Journal of International Affairs, and Al-Jazeera.

Please see my Résumé for more details.