Dirk’s research focuses on higher education, wage-setting mechanisms within firms and markets, wealth stratification, racial and ethnic earnings inequalities, immigration, intergenerational social mobility, elitism, mental health, and incarceration. His projects often include a cross-national comparative angle. While Dirk primarily uses computational and other quantitative methods in his own research, he retains a broad and interdisciplinary interest in qualitative methods and social science theory.
Dirk’s work in progress involves the role of social class compositions of workplaces in earnings inequality, racial-ethnic earnings inequalities in professional soccer, college wealth premia across high-income countries, institutional determinants of student loan debt, intergenerational social mobility in the Global South, college-occupation matching, the effect of loneliness on health, and the relationship between macro-economic conditions and occupational mobility gaps between immigrants and natives in the early 20th-century.
Dirk obtained a PhD in Sociology from the City University of New York (CUNY), the Graduate Center. He previously was a Postdoctoral Prize Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and a Departmental Lecturer in Sociology. His work has appeared in Social Forces, PNAS, Socio-Economic Review, Social Science Research, Sociology of Education, Work, Employment and Society, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, and Sociological Quarterly.
Dirk's publications can be found on Google Scholar.
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