Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University

Patrick Sharkey

Institute Fellow, Institute Fellow

Patrick Sharkey is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University,
with an affiliation at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
He will also be a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Columbia
University in academic years 2007-8 and 2008-9. He received his Ph.D. in
Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University in 2007.

Patrick's research seeks to broaden scholarly understanding of social inequality
by examining the ways that inequality is organized in social spaces such as
neighborhoods and cities, and considering the way that space structures
patterns of inequality and mobility. One strand of research focuses on
continuity and change in families’ neighborhood environments over individual
lifetimes and across generations of family members, with a special focus on the
mechanisms leading to the persistence of racial segregation and neighborhood
inequality in the decades following the Civil Rights movement. A second strand
of work examines how places have structured patterns of intergenerational
economic and social mobility. This research involves 1) estimating how the
economic fortunes of people are influenced by the fortunes of the cities they
occupy, and 2) developing causal models assessing the effect of cumulative
neighborhood disadvantage experienced over generations of family members on
patterns of occupational and economic mobility. This research agenda builds on
earlier work published in various outlets, including the American Journal of
Sociology, the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Policy Analysis and
Management, the Journal of Black Studies, and the American Review of Public
Administration.