About

Cristobal Young is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. His research spans the overlapping fields of economic sociology, stratification, and quantitative methodology. He studies social policies that influence income inequality, including millionaire taxes and unemployment insurance, with a focus on understanding their social consequences. His methodological work emphasizes the use of big administrative data, model uncertainty, and ensuring robust results. Young's work has contributed to debates on elite taxation, examining the social effects of taxing the wealthy and investigating whether millionaire tax flight undermines state policies. His research has been widely reported in major media outlets such as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, and has earned recognition through awards like the Granovetter Prize for best article in economic sociology. Additionally, he has explored topics related to unemployment and wellbeing, analyzing the non-pecuniary costs of job loss and the role of time as a network good. His recent projects include examining the consequences of extending consumerist logics into areas like medicine, higher education, and journalism, as well as addressing methodological challenges related to model uncertainty in empirical research.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Computer Science
• Labour economics
• Statistics
• Nursing
• Marketing
• Market economy
• Accounting
• Political economy
• Business
• Mathematics
• Finance
• Econometrics
• Macroeconomics
• History
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Inequality and Social Ties: Evidence from 15 U.S. Data Sets

  Sociological Science · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  What is the relationship between inequality and social ties? Do personal networks, group memberships, and connections to social resources help level the playing field, or do they reinforce economic disparities? We examine two core empirical issues: the degree of inequality in social ties and their consolidation with income. Using 142,000 person-wave observations from 15 high-quality U.S. data sets, we measure the quantity and quality of social ties and examine their distribution. Our findings show that (1) the Gini coefficient for social ties often exceeds that of income and (2) social ties are concentrated among those with the highest incomes. We introduce an overall inequality–consolidation curve, demonstrating that social ties generally reinforce economic inequality. However, we identify one key exception: there is no class gradient in the use of social ties for job search. These findings contribute to debates about the role of social ties in perpetuating or mitigating inequality.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Taxing the Rich: How Incentives and Embeddedness Shape Millionaire Tax Flight

  American Journal of Sociology · 2025-06-12 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Taxing the rich is a central debate in an era of high inequality. Elite taxation can reduce income disparities and fund public investments, yet it also incentivizes top earners to relocate—potentially eroding the tax base and undermining redistribution. We argue that tax migration occurs at the intersection of incentives and embeddedness: while tax incentives encourage relocation, place-specific social capital anchors individuals to their communities, discounting those incentives. Drawing on 3.9 million observations of top earners over seven years, we study two natural experiments using IRS administrative data. First, the 2017 federal tax overhaul reshaped tax incentives in favor of lower-tax states, sparking widespread predictions of tax flight. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic weakened embeddedness, disrupting social and professional ties that root top earners in place. By studying these shocks, we find that tax incentives influence migration at the margin, but embeddedness plays a central role in shaping top taxpayers’ mobility https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/737165

  PublisherDOI

• Review of “What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic”

  Social Forces · 2025-06-11

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• New York’s wealthy warn of a tax exodus after Mamdani’s win – but the data says otherwise

  2025-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Redefine statistical significance

  Artefactual Field Experiments · 2025-01-10 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• MULTIVRS: Stata module to conduct multiverse analysis

  Statistical Software Components · 2021-01-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  multivrs allows users to conduct a "many worlds" or multiverse analysis of modeling assumptions. Users specify a preferred model, as well as alternative estimation commands, control variables, variable coding, and standard error calculations that reflect different plausible assumptions. The model specification set is all possible combinations of these inputs. After estimating each specification, results are reported as a distribution of estimates.

  Publisher

• The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 24 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political economy
  • Economics

  In this age of globalization, many countries and U.S. states are worried about the tax flight of the rich. As income inequality grows and U.S. states consider raising taxes on their wealthiest residents, there is a palpable concern that these high rollers will board their private jets and fly away, taking their wealth with them. Many assume that the importance of location to a person's success is at an all-time low. Cristobal Young, however, makes the surprising argument that location is very important to the world's richest people. Frequently, he says, place has a great deal to do with how they make their millions. In The Myth of Millionaire Tax Flight , Young examines a trove of data on millionaires and billionaires—confidential tax returns, Forbes lists, and census records—and distills down surprising insights. While economic elites have the resources and capacity to flee high-tax places, their actual migration is surprisingly limited. For the rich, ongoing economic potential is tied to the place where they become successful—often where they are powerful insiders—and that success ultimately diminishes both the incentive and desire to migrate. This important book debunks a powerful idea that has driven fiscal policy for years, and in doing so it clears the way for a new era. Millionaire taxes, Young argues, could give states the funds to pay for infrastructure, education, and other social programs to attract a group of people who are much more mobile—the younger generation.

  PublisherDOI

• The Safety Net as a Springboard? A General Equilibrium Based Policy Evaluation

  Zurich Open Repository and Archive (University of Zurich) · 2020-08-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We develop a search-and-matching model where the magnitude of unemployment insurance benefits affects the likelihood that unemployed actually engage in active job search. To quan- titively discipline this relation we use administrative data of unemployed search audits. We use the model to quantify the effects of unemployment reforms. For small benefits' increases, the policymaker faces a trade-off between an uptick in the measure of unemployed actually searching and a fall in the unemployment exit-rate conditional on searching. For larger bene- fits' increases, an active search margin magnifies the benefits' disincentives, leading to a bigger drop in the employment rate than previously thought.

  OA PDFDOI

• 2. Do the Rich Flee High Taxes?

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-09-09

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Charles Varner

  Stanford University

  6 shared

• Katherine Holsteen

  5 shared

• Minjeong Jeon

  California Department of Education

  4 shared

• John P. A. Ioannidis

  Stanford University

  4 shared

• Jeff Rouder

  3 shared

• Valen E. Johnson

  3 shared

• Marcus R. Munafò

  MRC Epidemiology Unit

  3 shared

• Thomas Sellke

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• The Granovetter Prize for best article in economic sociology