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

I completed my doctoral studies in Sociology (Minor: Public Affairs) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in January 2023. My doctoral 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.  I spent the academic year of 2018-2019 at the University of British Columbia as a Visiting Doctoral Student where I completed coursework in computational methods. Prior to that, I also completed an M.A. in Economics and Sociology at New York University. My master’s thesis at NYU, defended in September 2014, examined the structural challenges to sectoral diversification across oil-based economies in the Global South.

Broadly, my interests lie at the nexus of social stratification, economic and political sociology. While my work employs computational and quantitative methods, I retain a keen interest in comparative historical methods.  In fact, at the heart of my research program lies a methodological objective: to deploy computational techniques to interrogate historically grounded questions of income and wealth inequality from a comparative perspective. Computationally, I use spatial econometric models, panel data analysis, and machine learning tools such as unsupervised techniques of clustering, decision trees as well as supervised learning  and regularization methods. Among the array of Comparative and Historical Methods, I am especially keen about event structure analysis (ESA), sequence analysis and process-tracing.

Chapters of my doctoral dissertation, now published  in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology and Social Science Research have won multiple awards from the American Sociological Association. A Chapter of my dissertation entitled “Intergenerational income mobility in the United States: A racial-spatial account” published in Social Science Research won the ASA’s Mathematical Sociology Section’s Outstanding Graduate Student Paper.

1.  American Sociological Association’s Mathematical Sociology’ Outstanding Graduate Student Paper. 

The second Chapter of my dissertation published in the International Journal of ComparativeSociology won the following awards: 

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

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

My papers have been published in the Journal of Industrial Relations, Spatial Demography,  Social Science Research, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Journal of International Development,  Sociological Quarterly (second article: Sociological Quarterly), Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements, Harvard Economics Review, and Harvard International Review.

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