Masoud Movahed

Masoud Movahed is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research lies at the nexus of social stratification and economic 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 as well as intergenerational income mobility, both cross-nationally and within the U.S. context. More specifically, his research draws on panel data analysis, spatial econometrics, and machine learning tools—including both unsupervised clustering techniques and supervised learning algorithms. While he is a computational and quantitively sociologist, he retains a keen interest in comparative-historical methods, particularly event structure analysis (ESA), sequence analysis, and process tracing. He is currently involved in an extensive and collaborative project with a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania focusing on poverty in America. He has also been part of collaborative projects that use computational text analysis focusing on topic modeling and sentiment analysis to study populism.

His studies have been published in Demography (forthcoming), Social Science Research, Journal of Industrial Relations, Spatial Demography, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Journal of International Development, The Sociological Quarterly, 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.