Rachel Dwyer CV

Google Scholar

Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate of the OSU Institute for Population Research and the Translational Data Analytics Institute.

Areas of expertise include social inequality, wealth inequality, credit, debt and inequality, economic sociology, health disparities, work and occupations, and urban sociology. Current research focuses on inequality in American society including in wealth, credit and debt, employment, and housing.

I study the causes and consequences of rising economic inequality in American society.  I started studying inequality in jobs and wages, but inequalities have a habit of being highly intertwined and so pulling on the thread of labor market inequality eventually led me to study housing disparities, neighborhood disadvantage, wealth and debt inequalities as well as health disparities.  My work on job inequality shows that middle-wage jobs are growing much more slowly than upper and lower wage jobs in America—and much more slowly than in the past—polarizing the American employment structure between the best and worst jobs.  What are the consequences of this change?  Well for one, I’ve found that our neighborhoods have also polarized as affluent people have increasingly moved away from poor and middle class people. 

Rising wealth inequality indebtedness is linked too as middle class families have fewer resources to give their kids a leg up and many rely on debt to pick up the slack, issues I have been exploring in my recent research. On several projects connected to debt and social policy contexts. I work to understand how financial strain is both cause and consequence of economic insecurity with rebounding effects on well-being. Other projects focus on young adult populations with lower average family wealth and therefore greater financial insecurity in the face of uncertainty and shock, and implications for disparities in health and wellbeing in the United States. Ongoing work focuses on how diverse state policies may impact debt holding and financial strain, including state financial regulation, social welfare support, and criminal justice policies. Wealthy populations, on the other hand, leverage credit access to build wealth and can shift around debt burdens to maximize advantage. Inequality in America is a difficult knot to unravel, but that makes it all the more interesting and important to keep pulling on the threads.