Tom VanHeuvelen

Over at the blog I wrote about a few interesting findings. * (Lack of) compliance with minimum wage laws * NAFTA kills * (Poor) working conditions reduce partisanship open.substack.com/pub/asocial/... Hope you find this interesting!

Families in the top 10% spend 13x more on developmental activities than those in the bottom 25%, compared to 3x in 1980. "Even More Unequal Childhoods: 45 years of Widening Income Gaps in Parental Investments in the United States" now out at @sociologicalsci.bsky.social doi.org/10.15195/v13... 🧵👇

Have we abandoned #TWFE too quickly?😮 New in #Sociological #Methodology w/ @aksoyundan.bsky.social We compare TWFE event studies vs dynamic #DID estimators. Results suggest a more nuanced picture than "never use TWFE" and clarify when different estimators perform well 👇 🔗 doi.org/10.1177/0081...

In honor of #LaborDay Learn how unionization affect health disparities in old age: bit.ly/3ANbO3D By Xiaowen Han @tvanheuvelen.bsky.social Jeylan T. Mortimer & @zparolin.bsky.social @umnsociology.bsky.social @minnpop.bsky.social @Unibocconi @asamedsoc.bsky.social

A college degree still offers a strong earnings premium, yet more graduates are experiencing negative labor-market outcomes. On Sept. 29, @tvanheuvelen.bsky.social draws on seven datasets spanning 75 years to examine this shift. Free and open to all. RSVP: bit.ly/CID-RSVP

Nice reminder from Richard Feynman of some of the benefits of teaching.

Friends don't let friends continue to give exams and papers that are not adapted to the current AI landscape www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty... (this is AFTER 27 bailed so the reality is even worse) PS Props to students 1, 22, and 31

Very cool forthcoming ASR by @aeppli.bsky.social . Relevant for those interested in inequality, job quality, organizations. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Congrats to Prof. @mathuclair.bsky.social who received the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association's IPM Section! @asa-ipm.bsky.social @asanews.bsky.social sociology.stanford.edu/news/matt-cl...

UW-Madison Sociology is hiring! We're inviting applications for an assistant professor position in the fields of demography, soc of population, and health, to begin August 2027. Come join @uwsoc.bsky.social and the great @cdeuw.bsky.social! Apply here: jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

How do individuals combine health behaviors to form adult health lifestyles? #NewPublication in our May issue finds significant yet complex parent/adult child correspondence in health lifestyles and behaviors: bit.ly/4a7lVPJ By Mahala Miller Jane S. VanHeuvelen & @tvanheuvelen.bsky.social

Pat does it again. Important - ... depressing, but important - findings.

Ed Cornelius (University of Minnesota-Twin Cities) is a recipient of the 2026 Dissertation Award, for “Car Wash Legacies: Lawyers, Globalization, and the Restructuring of the Brazilian Penal Field,” completed at @utoronto.ca. bit.ly/ASA26Awards

Erin Ice (University of Texas at Austin) is a recipient of the 2026 Dissertation Award, for “My Mother’s Keeper: The Singularity of Caregiving in the U.S.,” completed at @umich.edu. bit.ly/ASA26Awards

Woohoo!! Congrats Jillian!! @umnsociology.bsky.social

“Effect of the Great Recession on U.S. Fertility”: Using a cohort discontinuity design, Wu, @nickdemark.bsky.social & Hill show “strong & credibly causal evidence” that the GR altered fertility behavior, esp. for the youngest cohorts (relative declines of 7-30%). read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

A new Annual Review article by @arnoutvanderijt.bsky.social and colleagues worth a read. Don't let the formal modeling of luck fool you. This is one of the more interesting, and all around crazier, articles I've read recently. Super cool. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

In “Dynamic Contributions of Chronic Diseases,” Hui Zheng found half of the ↑ gap in activity limitations was assoc w/ ↑ disability probabilities “linked to mental illness, lung diseases & musculoskeletal conditions” among those w/o a college degree. @utoronto.ca read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a...

UPDATE + we get to celebrate a win: Yesterday the U.S. House PASSED the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which would make it easier for workers to secure a first union contract without unnecessary delay. 🎉

Could be updated, but to a close approximation they used to stop 50-100 people a day for speeding/red lights/DWI suspicion etc. Then they just decided not to do that from about June 2020.

"Family Networks and Childcare Choices: A Predictive Machine Learning Approach" Just out in our journal, @sociologicalsci.bsky.social

Some remarks and evidence on the interesting report of the Onderwijsraad (Education Council) on standardized testing. Standardized testing in the Dutch educational system > open.substack.com/pub/hermwerf...

Delighted to have had the opportunity to talk to the legend that is @durlauf.bsky.social about inequality and the division of labor.

Stratification research in sociology and sister fields open.substack.com/pub/hermwerf...

Great news here. This was a v interesting book to read, highly recommend. I assigned it as one of the possible books to read in a book club project in my undergrad inequality course. The students who read Doubled Up were super, super engaged w the book. Really fired up about it.

It seems we are now entering a new phase of the rise of inequality in the US. It's not just wealth and billionaires — it's a broader acceleration. Here's who benefited from economic growth in 2025, according to the latest estimates available on realtimeinequality.org

@umnsociology.bsky.social @pennye.bsky.social

If you're interested in job quality, the AJQS is a fabulous new source of data. Check it out.

Whoa! "When Walmart Supercenter openings do occur, union membership declines by an average of 3.5 percentage points...Remaining union members are not protected against Walmart’s downward pressure on earnings." Very imp. looking new article.

What inequality-related articles from 2025 should sociologists be reading? The IPM Section is creating a community-sourced reading list of notable 2025 articles on inequality, poverty, mobility, stratification, and related topics. Submit your recommendations here: forms.gle/QWQuLZfVc5y3...

Shifting returns to education, not educational inequality, is the main force driving intergenerational income persistence today. doi.org/10.1093/sf/s... Proud supervisor moment to see this out in @sfjournal.bsky.social

Here's that preprint. We take a look at the use of common replication-crisis reforms such as pre-analysis plans in observational sociology. How can these reforms function outside experiments, when the goal of controlling false positives loses relevance? @socarxiv.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/so...

Cool historical inequality work by Alfani. He also wrote a great book, As Gods Among Men. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

Good teachers don't just raise the achievement of students they teach. They also shape the teachers of tomorrow. Standard estimates of teacher impact ignore these intergenerational spillovers. Thread on new work led by @danilok.bsky.social. Paper: osf.io/preprints/so... 1/10

Apropos of some debate on Piketty-Saez-Zucman versus Auten-Splinter brewing again on the other site, let me post my lecture notes that does a deep dive into this, looking at both pre- and post-tax income inequality. Link: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4k5gj...

Lovely example for teaching of how weak statistical designs can produce misleading results, and how stronger designs can fix that.

New ASR paper finds no effect of state right-to-work laws on employment or number of business establishments (1946-2019). Argues that state spillovers, such as tax breaks in non-right-to-work states, explain the non-effect of right-to-work. gated: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

shoutout to @hannahrecht.bsky.social for a fantastic R package. This is a great way to get US census data: github.com/hrecht/censu... #EconSky

Excited to see this collaboration w Alec Rhodes out in the American Sociological Review. "State Right to Work Laws and Economic Dynamism in U.S. Counties, 1946 to 2019" journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...