About
Daniel Schneider is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Sociology in FAS at Harvard University. He is co-director of The Shift Project.
His research is at the intersection of inequality, labor, social demography, and social policy. His current work examines the causes, contours, and consequences of precarious working conditions and leverages novel survey data and stakeholder partnerships to understand how labor standards and high-road company practices can improve working conditions, economic security, and the well-being of workers and their families.
As co-director of the Shift Project, Schneider has co-led survey data collection from over 250,000 hourly service-sector workers to construct employer-employee linked datasets with measures of working conditions, economic security, health, and wellbeing. His research has documented patterns of precarious work in the service sector and within- and between-firm segregation in workplace inequality. He has also analyzed the consequences of employment instability for workers and families.
Schneider’s research also examines class inequality in parenting, the relationship between economic resources and marriage, divorce, and fertility, the effects of the Great Recession, and household financial fragility.
He is the author of more than 60 peer-reviewed papers, which have appeared in leading social science journals, including the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, the American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs, Social Service Review, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His work is regularly covered in the national press, including in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets.
He is the 2022 recipient of the Population Association of America’s Early Achievement Award and was a William T. Grant Foundation Faculty Scholar from 2018–2023. His research has received multiple best paper awards and has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as private foundations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
He received his AB from Brown University in Public Policy and his PhD from Princeton University in Sociology and Social Policy. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar in Health Policy Research at UC Berkeley/UCSF and previously served on the faculty in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley.
