Stephen Morgan is a distinguished scholar in the area of the
sociology of education whose quantitatively-oriented research spans from racial differences in educational attainment to wealth and inequality in the United States. His cross-disciplinary scholarship centers on three interrelated themes: models of achievement and
attainment in the sociology of education; models of
labor market and
wealth inequality in
social stratification; and, counterfactual models of
causality in quantitative methodology. This work has undertaken to integrate socialization-based models in sociology and rational-choice-based models in economics. In his 2005 volume,
On the Edge of Commitment: Educational Attainment and Race in the United States, he introduced a stochastic decisions tree model to formalize the modeling of students' beliefs and the commitment behavior that follows from them. More recently, he has applied this line of research in a project that centers on the coding of verbatim responses to occupational plans questions of approximately 13,000 students across three points in time, 2002–2006. Papers resulting from that work demonstrate how uncertainty and inaccuracy of students' beliefs predict commitment-related behavior in high school, and then bear upon
academic achievement and subsequent patterns of
college entry. These studies provide
empirical support for the models laid out in his 2005 book, now characterized as "
stutter-step models" of performance and choice. Recent extensions include a focus on college entry processes and trajectories of performance in college, with a paper on
gender differences in the selection of first major. Another extension examines the experience of
immigrant children and their college persistence and completion patterns.
Studies of earnings, wealth, and changes in inequality Morgan has written a series of papers that evaluate whether selective rent-destruction is a plausible explanation for recent increases in
earnings inequality in the United States. This work uses the concept of "rent" to specify the structural advantages inherent in
labor market positions, both as workers' rent paid out in
wages that exceed
counterfactual competitive
equilibrium wages and as owners' rent paid out in stock purchase and incentive bonus schemes beyond base
compensation. Among the results of this work are conclusions that implicate how
structural changes in the economy have altered the ways in which rents are distributed to workers of different types. Morgan's studies also have evaluated consequences of the recent growth of inequality, one of which finds little evidence that the growth of earnings inequality has triggered sympathetic growth in inequality of educational attainment.
Quantitative methodology Stephen Morgan's empirical studies have explored a logic of
inference appropriate to the
social sciences. His 2007 volume with
Christopher Winship,
Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research, was unique in both synthesizing and integrating the literature from
sociology,
statistics, and
econometrics on counterfactual models in
causal analysis in sociology. Morgan's other contributions to the logic and methods of
causal inference in social research include research on diagnostic routines for detecting
heterogeneity in causal effect estimates and applications of the causal graph methodology, including applications to the tradition of educational transitions modeling and to experimental data in survey research. == Awards ==