Research
I am a sociologist studying class and economic inequality: how advantage is produced, concentrated at the top, and transmitted across generations. With Chile as my main case, I examine how class shapes the organisation of paid and unpaid work, the politics of redistribution, and the ways inequality becomes visible through surveys and official statistics. Across these areas, measurement is a tool for understanding the institutions and relationships that sustain unequal life chances.
Main project: class beyond percentiles
Top-income corrections are usually evaluated by how much additional inequality they uncover. My project asks a different question: who are the missing rich in class terms, and which concept of class best captures the structure revealed by these corrections?
Data and approach. I apply top-income corrections to Chile’s CASEN series (2006–2024) while retaining each person’s class position. This makes it possible to examine the corrected top as a class structure rather than simply as a percentile.
Contribution. I identify the social composition of the corrected top and compare how different concepts of class account for the inequality that becomes visible. The project then considers what this revised picture of the top implies for the reproduction of advantage across generations.
Related work. The project develops questions that emerged from my participation in Chile’s first official top-income-corrected inequality estimates (2026), produced at the Social Observatory of the Ministry of Social Development and Family.
A first working paper from this project is in preparation.
Articles in progress
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. Revised manuscript in preparation for journal submission.
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 around 1,000 female university students in Santiago (UDP, 2023), 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 technical co-authorship 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.