Curriculum vitae

Mom's Wrigley, dad's Field. (It's fun.)

What it's like to be named Elizabeth Wrigley-Field:

• High school take
• Grad school take

My research in demography and sociology concerns two substantive topics: health stratification within cohorts, and racial disparities in job insecurity in the United States. Both lines of research explore the interactions between multiple dimensions of inequality -- racial, economic, and health -- and examine how aggregate measures of risk -- e.g., the risk of dying, becoming sick, or being laid off -- reflect inequalities both across and within social groups.

My dissertation documents racial disparities in job insecurity in the United States, 1979-2011, and analyzes the role of occupational and industrial segregation in producing these disparities. I seek to understand the historical calamity that the end of the Civil Rights era was also the beginning of the era of economic restructuring: just as areas of the economy were opened, for the first time, to non-white workers, those jobs may have become less secure.

My other major strand of research is on modeling unobserved heterogeneity in mortality distributions, particularly in the context that health inequalities are composed of multiple interacting dimensions of inequality, only some of which are observed.