Social Stratification & Inequality

Substantively, I study social stratification and inequality with quantitative and computational methods. My research are focusing on the following three aspects of social inequality.

Education

I study how access to and completion of higher education equalize and stratify life chances over the life course.

Working Papers:

Xu, Jiahui, Jennie E. Brand, Tanvi Shinkre, and Nanum Jeon. “Flexibly Detecting Heterogeneous Treatment Effects with an Application to the Effects of College in Reducing Poverty.” [latest working paper]

Published Papers:

Brand, Jennie E., Jiahui Xu, Bernard Koch, and Pablo Geraldo. “Uncovering Sociological Effect Heterogeneity Using Tree-Based Machine Learning.” Sociological Methodology (2021): 0081175021993503. [PDF] [Replication] [R Package]

Health

I study how social institutions stratify the health outcomes in U.S. and how education reduces the disparities.

Working Papers:

Xu, Jiahui, “Counterfactual Decomposition of Racial/Ethnic Health Disparities: Insights from Medicaid Expansion in U.S.”

Luo, Liying, Jiahui Xu, John Robert Warren, Kenneth Langa. “Increasing Child’s Education Improves Parent’s Dementia Risk and the Educational Gradients: A Two-Generation Approach”

Published Papers:

Xu, Jiahui, Liying Luo, Alyssa Gamaldo, Ashton Verdery, Melissa Hardy, Orfeu M. Buxton, and Qian Xiao. “Trends in sleep duration in the US from 2004 to 2018: A decomposition analysis.” SSM-Population Health 25 (2024): 101562. [PDF]

Luo, Liying, Emma Zang, and Jiahui Xu. “Regional differences in intercohort and intracohort trends in obesity in the USA: evidence from the National Health Interview Survey, 1982–2018.” BMJ open 12, no. 7 (2022): e060469. [PDF]

Balcilar, Mehmet, Jeffrey B. Nugent, and Jiahui Xu. “Adversities in Syria and their relation to their physical and mental health conditions as Syrian refugees in Turkey.” Scottish Journal of Political Economy 69.1 (2022): 37-59. [PDF]

Occupation

I study how social institutional affect health outcomes through the choice of occupations. Also, I use and develop algorithism to automatically code occupational write-in data (try the AutoCoder). Additionally, I investigate how rise of Asian-dominated occupations emerge as a driver of growing earnings between Asian and White workers in the United States especially after 2010.

Working Papers:

Song, Xi and Jiahui Xu. “The Rise of Asian-Dominated Occupations Emerges as a Driver of Growing Earnings Inequality Between Asian and White Workers in the United States.”

Quantitative & Computational Methodology

I am interested in demographic methods, causal machine learning and neural language models.

Working Papers:

Xu, Jiahui, Jennie E. Brand, Tanvi Shinkre, and Nanum Jeon. “Flexibly Detecting Heterogeneous Treatment Effects with an Application to the Effects of College in Reducing Poverty.”

Published Papers:

Brand, Jennie E., Jiahui Xu, Bernard Koch, and Pablo Geraldo. “Uncovering Sociological Effect Heterogeneity Using Tree-Based Machine Learning.” Sociological Methodology 51, no. 2 (2021): 189-223. [PDF] [Replication] [R Package]

Xu, Jiahui, and Liying Luo. “APCI: an R and Stata package for visualizing and analyzing age-period-cohort data.” R Journal 14, no. 2 (2022): 77. [PDF] [R Package]

Book Chapters:

Brand, Jennie E., Jiahui Xu, and Bernard Koch. “Machine Learning.” In SAGE Research Methods Foundations, edited by P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J.W. Sakshaug, and R.A. Williams. 2019. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526421036883644. [PDF]