Research
My research examines the upper reaches of the class structure: who occupies advantaged positions, how ownership, control and employment relations shape their internal divisions, and how they are reproduced across generations. Chile provides a setting for connecting relational class analysis with research on income and wealth inequality.
Main project: class beyond percentiles
Household surveys underrepresent high-income groups and capital income. This poses a theoretical as well as a measurement problem: does the missing top lead us to underestimate the importance of property relations in structuring inequality?
Using Chile’s CASEN surveys (2006–2024), I plan to combine tax, census and national accounts data with individual-level class information to examine three questions:
- How do top-income corrections change the class composition of the upper income distribution?
- Do distinctions between property owners and salaried managers and professionals reveal inequalities obscured by conventional class categories?
- How do these distinctions affect estimates of intergenerational reproduction and social closure?
The project builds on my work on Chile’s first official top-income-corrected inequality estimates (2026).
A first working paper from this project is in preparation.
Other manuscripts
Gender, class and working time in Chile. Uses the 2023 National Time Use Survey (ENUT) to examine how class and gender jointly structure paid and unpaid working time — total workloads, the domestic division of labour, and how the two intersect across class positions. Under review at Estudios Sociológicos (El Colegio de México).
Taxing the rich and the redistributive state. Why does concern about inequality only sometimes translate into demands for redistribution? Draws on Chile’s Tax Culture Survey (2020–2021) and the ISSP series to trace the politicisation of fiscal attitudes after a decade of inequality-centred protest. Draft manuscript.
Emotional orientations toward the future and reproductive intentions. Collaborative mixed-methods study of 986 female university students in Santiago, asking how emotional orientations toward the future relate to reproductive intentions, net of structural constraints. I lead the quantitative strand (latent class analysis, topic modelling of open-ended responses) and designed the sampling for the qualitative follow-up. Quantitative paper in draft; collaborative project ongoing.
Official statistics and survey methodology
Beyond the inequality report, my applied work at the Ministry includes the cohort profile of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ELPI), published in the International Journal of Epidemiology (2026), and a contribution to the small-area estimation methodology of the FAO study on small area estimation of food insecurity in Chilean municipalities (2024). I am also the author of dosr, an R package on CRAN for estimation and reliability assessment in complex survey designs, and I teach survey methodology at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile — see Software and Teaching.