Cristobal Young

Associate Professor

Overview

Cristobal Young works in the overlapping fields of economic sociology, stratification, and quantitative methodology. He studies the social policies that moderate income inequality, ranging from millionaire taxes to unemployment insurance. His methodological work focuses on big administrative data, model uncertainty, and robust results.

Publications

Taxing the Rich

What are the social consequences of elite taxation? Does millionaire tax flight undermine state policies?

The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight: How Place Still Matters for the Rich. Stanford University Press.

For a quick overview, see my op-ed in The Guardian 

Millionaire Migration and the Taxation of the Elite: Evidence from Administrative DataAmerican Sociological Review. June, 2016. 

This work has been reported in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, and more. It also won the Granovetter Prize for best article in economic sociology.

Unemployment and Wellbeing

My dissertation focused on the experience of job loss and policies to alleviate its distress. 

Losing a Job: The Non-Pecuniary Cost of Unemployment in the United States. Social Forces. 2012.

Time as a Network Good: Evidence from Unemployment and the Standard WorkweekSociological Science. 2014.

For the overview, see my New York Times op-ed, You Don’t Need More Free Time

Patients as Consumers in the Market for Medicine

This is a newer project, looking at the consequences of extending consumerist logics into more and more areas of life, such as medicine, higher education, and journalism.

From the Cornell Chronicle: “Hospitality, not medical care, key to patient satisfaction” 

Model Uncertainty and the Multiverse of Methods

In an age of computational power and methodological abundance, empirical results can be very sensitive to the choice of model specification. How can researchers show their findings are robust?

I write about this a lot; here is a broad overview:

Model Uncertainty and the Crisis in Science.” 2018. Socius.

In the news

SOC Courses - Fall 2024

SOC Courses - Spring 2025

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