About

David B. Grusky is the Edward Ames Edmonds Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. He serves as the Faculty Director of the Center on Poverty & Inequality and is a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) as well as a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Program on Poverty and Inequality (PHS). His research focuses on inequality, poverty, and mobility, utilizing quantitative methods to explore these areas. He is involved in promoting and supporting the Department of Sociology at Stanford, contributing to research questions, centers, and highlights related to social inequality.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Geography
• Economics
• Computer Science
• Econometrics
• Demographic economics
• Demography
• Mathematics
• Medicine
• Biology
• Finance
• Economic geography
• Economic growth
• Socioeconomics

Selected publications

• The Persistent Poverty Initiative’s Framework to Address Social and Economic Determinants of Cancer

  Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention · 2025-08-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Social determinants of health are known drivers of a broad range of cancer outcomes. These determinants influence factors at the structural and institutional levels of society, which disproportionately affects those living in persistent poverty. Americans living in persistent poverty areas experience higher cancer incidence, delayed cancer diagnosis and treatment, and greater cancer morbidity and mortality. This report describes the aims of the NCI's Persistent Poverty Initiative, a novel research program developed to study the association of structural and institutional factors that affect cancer outcomes in persistent poverty areas. The goals of the five funded centers located across the country are described. A detailed multilevel conceptual framework was developed to incorporate the perspectives of the five centers. The framework serves as a model for other researchers studying the complex social factors and pathways that contribute to cancer outcomes. Future research can build upon this work to integrate multilevel intervention models that can examine the association of upstream social determinants of health factors and cancer outcomes. The Persistent Poverty Initiative can serve as a model for addressing cancer outcomes at the structural and institutional levels, which will hopefully lead to improved local, state, and national strategies in an effort to achieve optimal health for all.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Listening to the Voices of America

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2024-08-20 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  We make the case for building a permanent public-use platform for conducting and analyzing immersive interviews on the everyday lives of Americans. The American Voices Project (AVP)—a widely watched experiment with this new platform—provides important early evidence on its promise. The articles in this issue reveal that, although public-use interview datasets obviously cannot meet all research needs, they do provide new opportunities to study small or hidden populations, new or emerging social problems, reactions to ongoing social crises, submerged values and attitudes, and many other aspects of American life. We conclude that a permanent AVP platform would help build an “open science” form of qualitative research that complements—rather than replaces—the existing very important body of immersive-interviewing research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Listening to the Voices of America

  RSF The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences · 2024-08-26 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  We make the case for building a permanent public-use platform for conducting and analyzing immersive interviews on the everyday lives of Americans. The American Voices Project (AVP)—a widely watched experiment with this new platform—provides important early evidence on its promise. The articles in this issue reveal that, although public-use interview datasets obviously cannot meet all research needs, they do provide new opportunities to study small or hidden populations, new or emerging social problems, reactions to ongoing social crises, submerged values and attitudes, and many other aspects of American life. We conclude that a permanent AVP platform would help build an “open science” form of qualitative research that complements—rather than replaces—the existing very important body of immersive-interviewing research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• :<i>Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor</i>

  American Journal of Sociology · 2024-10-25

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Landing a Middle-Class Position: College Degree, Occupational Status and Income of Young Adults in Taiwan

  2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Human mobility networks reveal increased segregation in large cities

  Nature · 2023 · 122 citations

  • Sociology
  • Geography
  • Demographic economics

  . Here we develop a measure of exposure segregation that captures the socioeconomic diversity of these everyday encounters. Using mobile phone mobility data to represent 1.6 billion real-world exposures among 9.6 million people in the United States, we measure exposure segregation across 382 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) and 2,829 counties. We find that exposure segregation is 67% higher in the ten largest MSAs than in small MSAs with fewer than 100,000 residents. This means that, contrary to expectations, residents of large cosmopolitan areas have less exposure to a socioeconomically diverse range of individuals. Second, we find that the increased socioeconomic segregation in large cities arises because they offer a greater choice of differentiated spaces targeted to specific socioeconomic groups. Third, we find that this segregation-increasing effect is countered when a city's hubs (such as shopping centres) are positioned to bridge diverse neighbourhoods and therefore attract people of all socioeconomic statuses. Our findings challenge a long-standing conjecture in human geography and highlight how urban design can both prevent and facilitate encounters among diverse individuals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Very Uneven Playing Field: Economic Mobility in the United States

  American Journal of Sociology · 2023-12-21 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  The authors present results from a new data set that has been assembled from tax and other administrative sources to provide evidence on economic mobility and persistence in the United States. This data set allows the authors to take on the methodological problems that have complicated previous efforts to estimate intergenerational income elasticities. The resulting estimates of intergenerational persistence are as high as all but the highest of the previously reported survey-based estimates. Because the intergenerational curves are especially steep within the parental-income region defined by the 50th–90th percentiles, approximately two-thirds of the inequality between poor and well-off families is passed on to the next generation. This extreme persistence cannot be attributed to any single factor. Instead, the United States is exceptional with respect to virtually all factors governing intergenerational persistence, including the returns to human capital, the amount of public investment in the human capital of low-income children, the amount of socioeconomic segregation, and the progressiveness of the tax-and-transfer system. It follows that any substantial increase in mobility will require a wide-ranging package of reforms that cut across many institutions.

  PublisherDOI

• The intergenerational sources of the U-turn in gender segregation

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022-08-01 · 18 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In the early 1970s, the balkanization of the US labor market into "men's occupations" and "women's occupations" began to unravel, as women entered the professions and other male-typed sectors in record numbers. This decline in gender segregation continued on for several decades but then suddenly stalled at the turn of the century and shows no signs of resuming. Although the stall is itself undisputed, its sources remain unclear. Using nearly a half-century of data from the General Social Survey, we show that a resurgence in segregation-inducing forms of intergenerational transmission stands behind the recent stall. Far from serving as impartial conduits, fathers are now disproportionately conveying male-typed occupations to their sons, whereas mothers are effectively gender-neutral in their transmission outcomes. This segregative turn among fathers accounts for 47% of the stall in the gender segregation trend (between 2000 and 2018), while the earlier integrative turn among fathers accounts for 34% of the initial downturn in segregation (between 1972 and 1999). It follows that a U-turn in intergenerational processes lies behind the U-turn in gender segregation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Very Uneven Playing Field: Economic Mobility in the United States

  2022-05-12 · 13 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  We present results from a new data set, the Statistics of Income Mobility Panel, that has been assembled from tax and other administrative sources to provide evidence on economic mobility and persistence in the United States. This data set allows us to take on the methodological problems that have complicated previous efforts to estimate intergenerational earnings and income elasticities. We find that the elasticities for women’s income, men’s income, and men’s earnings are as high as all but the highest of the previously reported survey-based estimates. Because the intergenerational curves are especially steep within the parental-income region defined by the 50th to 90th percentiles, approximately two-thirds of the inequality between poor and well-off families is passed on to the next generation. This extreme persistence cannot be attributed to any single factor. Instead, the U.S. is exceptional with respect to virtually all factors governing intergenerational persistence, including the returns to human capital, the amount of public investment in the human capital of low-income children, the amount of socioeconomic segregation, and the progressiveness of the tax-and-transfer system. For each of these four factors, the U.S. has opted for policies that are mobility-reducing, with the implication that any substantial increase in mobility will likely require a wide-ranging package of reforms that cut across many institutions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Human mobility networks reveal increased segregation in large cities

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2022-10-13 · 5 citations

  preprintOpen access

  A long-standing expectation is that large, dense, and cosmopolitan areas support socioeconomic mixing and exposure between diverse individuals. It has been difficult to assess this hypothesis because past approaches to measuring socioeconomic mixing have relied on static residential housing data rather than real-life exposures between people at work, in places of leisure, and in home neighborhoods. Here we develop a new measure of exposure segregation (ES) that captures the socioeconomic diversity of everyday encounters. Leveraging cell phone mobility data to represent 1.6 billion exposures among 9.6 million people in the United States, we measure exposure segregation across 382 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and 2829 counties. We discover that exposure segregation is 67% higher in the 10 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) than in small MSAs with fewer than 100,000 residents. This means that, contrary to expectation, residents of large cosmopolitan areas have significantly less exposure to diverse individuals. Second, we find evidence that large cities offer a greater choice of differentiated spaces targeted to specific socioeconomic groups, a dynamic that accounts for this increase in everyday socioeconomic segregation. Third, we discover that this segregation-increasing effect is countered when a city's hubs (e.g. shopping malls) are positioned to bridge diverse neighborhoods and thus attract people of all socioeconomic statuses. Overall, our findings challenge a long-standing conjecture in human geography and urban design, and highlight how built environment can both prevent and facilitate exposure between diverse individuals.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Christopher Wimer

  Columbia University

  17 shared

• Pablo A. Mitnik

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  16 shared

• Kim A. Weeden

  15 shared

• Tobias Raffel

  14 shared

• Geoffrey Samuels

  11 shared

• Jure Leskovec

  Stanford University

  9 shared

• Roland Berger

  9 shared

• Jan Ö. Jönsson

  University of Oxford

  8 shared