Dirk Witteveen

Senior Lecturer 

Social Policy and Economic Inequality

I'm a comparative social policy researcher and sociologist at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College. My research lines focus on education, wage-setting mechanisms within firms and markets, wealth stratification, racial and ethnic earnings inequalities, immigration, intergenerational social mobility, elitism, mental health, and mass incarceration. Most of my studies contain a cross-national comparative angle. I use computational and other quantitative methods in my own research, while retaining a broad interest in advances in qualitative methods and social theory. 

Currently, I teach comparative social policy and political economy in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention. I previously taught sociological theory for undergraduates in Human Sciences and Philosophy, Politics, Economics (PPE), and quantitative replication and research design for graduate students in Sociology and Demography. 

I obtained a PhD in Sociology from the City University of New York (CUNY), the Graduate Center. I held visiting positions at Stockholm University (2015 and 2021) and the Center for European Studies at Harvard University (AY '22-'23). I previously was a Postdoctoral Prize Fellow at Nuffield College, in Oxford. I am currently on the job market.

Some of my current projects involve the role of social class compositions of workplaces in earnings inequality, racial-ethnic earnings inequalities in professional soccer, college wealth premia in high-income countries, intergenerational social mobility in the Global South, the effect of loneliness on health, and payoffs from education-skill-occupation matching in the US.