About

Sarah Miller is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in joint appointment with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University. She is an ethnographer who specializes in youth cultures, focusing her work on how adolescents navigate intersectional inequalities at school and on social media. Her forthcoming book, The Tolerance Generation: Growing Up Online in the Anti-Bullying Era, examines how teens grapple with bullying in the digital age and the industry designed to prevent it. Her research has been published in Gender & Society, Sexualities, and the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, and has received funding from the American Sociological Association, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Her next book project will explore the impact of school shooting threats on young people's experiences of K-12 education. As a public sociologist, she has worked on initiatives aimed at advancing adolescent health and sexuality education policy. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Econometrics
• Economics
• Labour economics
• Macroeconomics
• Demographic economics
• Public economics

Selected publications

• Breaking political boundaries

  2025-01-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Employment effects of minimum wage indexing: Establishment evidence from Oregon restaurants

  Economic Inquiry · 2025-03-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Abstract Though 18 states will index their minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index by 2025, few studies have examined indexing's differential employment effects. Leveraging a period of stability in minimum wages (2000–2007) and two distinct national geocoded databases of establishments, we explore how indexing affected employment in Oregon restaurants, one of the earliest indexing states (2003). Nearest‐neighbor matching is used as a preprocessing step before regression, pairing individual restaurants in Oregon to restaurants with similar characteristics in states where the minimum wage was unchanged. We find evidence that establishment employment falls 3.6% after indexing, implying an employment elasticity of −0.18.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Employment Effects of Minimum Wage Indexing: Establishment Evidence from Oregon Restaurants

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Estimating the Effect of Rent-Seeking on income distribution: an analysis of U.S. States and Counties

  Public Choice · 2022 · 8 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Economics
  • Demographic economics
  PublisherDOI

• Sociología aplicada: problemas y oportunidades

  Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas eBooks · 2019-03-29

  book

  <p>Este libro se ocupa de un asunto fundamental en la sociología y otras ciencias sociales afines: trata de mostrar cómo los resultados de la sociología son utilizados para resolver problemas por parte de una variedad de organismos en el sector público, en la sociedad civil o en la empresa. Ofrece una panorámica de los usos de la sociología más allá del mundo académico y un conjunto de reflexiones sobre los problemas de aplicación del conocimiento.</p> <p><br />La orientación aplicada o práctica frente a la más básica o académica ha constituido una de las tensiones esenciales de la disciplina desde comienzos del siglo XX, como se refleja en las numerosas llamadas de atención por parte de autores clásicos –desde el “saber para prever” de Augusto Comte hasta la defensa de la racionalidad de las ciencias sociales para orientar la acción expresada en las obras de Max Weber o Emile Durkheim–. Esta división entre el conocimiento fundamental y la aplicación práctica ha influido en la estructura social de la disciplina, en sus instituciones e incluso en los rasgos culturales que caracterizan a la sociología.</p> <p><br />Sociología aplicada no solo constituye un claro exponente de la nueva visión, más compleja y autocrítica, del papel del sociólogo, sino que contiene ya muchos ingredientes de la manera de interpretar y discutir la práctica de la sociología en nuestros días.</p>

  PublisherDOI

• Do Piketty and Saez Misstate Income Inequality? Critiquing the Critiques

  Review of Political Economy · 2017-01-02 · 21 citations

  article

  A large body of literature points to sharply growing income inequality over the past half century. The Piketty and Saez dataset that measures income distribution provides empirical support for this claim. Our article evaluates three prominent criticisms of this dataset as well as the responses of Piketty and Saez to these criticisms. One key argument against using their dataset is that Piketty and Saez do not control for income shifting by top income earners in response to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) and thus overstate income inequality. In evaluating this criticism we find that a segment of their dataset likely understates income inequality; this is just the opposite of what critics assert. This implies that the Piketty–Saez dataset is a valuable resource for income inequality research and that scholars can use it to build more refined, accurate and insightful measures of income inequality.

  PublisherDOI

• The Working Class Subculture: A New View

  2017-07-12 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The cyclothymic views of workers are more fitting as a topic in the sociology of knowledge than they are in the analysis of what workers actually believe and practice. This chapter presents a few elements of what the authors believe is a more realistic picture of workers. The nature of the conditions of working class lives (jobs, opportunities, family structure) affects behavior more than has been frequently realized; similarly, modes of understanding the environment can be more important than deep-seated personality factors in behavioral patterns. The recognition of the importance of the internal life of man has sometimes overshadowed the significance of the more manifest aspects of his existence. Coping with the instability threats becomes a dominant activity within the working class family. Many practices, such as mutual aid and cooperation, extended family perspectives, are important as adjustive mechanisms.

  PublisherDOI

• L’offensive contre l’État-providence aux États-Unis

  International Review of Community Development · 2016-01-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  L’article décrit brièvement une série de facteurs politiques et économiques qui ont contribué à la montée du néo-conservatisme aux États-Unis. Il dresse un bilan critique des orientations économiques promues par l’administration Reagan, dénonce l’offensive dont l’État-providence est l’objet, souligne les liens qui existent entre la production de la pauvreté et les processus de restructuration économique. Il s’interroge sur l’ampleur du soutien populaire dont jouit l’administration Reagan et propose une série de stratégies susceptibles de prévenir le désastre économique et politique vers lequel s’acheminent les États-Unis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Looking Under the Lamp-Post: Using the Piketty-Saez Data Set to Understand Income Inequality and Income Shifting

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2012-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Education, Intelligence, and Belief Intensity

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2012-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Martin Rein

  München Klinik Bogenhausen

  9 shared

• Frank Riessman

  8 shared

• Pamela Roby

  5 shared

• Marco Martiniello

  University of Liège

  4 shared

• Vitor Melo

  2 shared

• Edward T. Chang

  2 shared

• George Mechling

  Western Carolina University

  2 shared

• Nattvidad Gutiérrez

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Awards & honors

• American Sociological Association funding
• National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation funding
• National Science Foundation funding