Ken-Hou Lin
Professor of Sociology · University of Texas at Austin
About
I study how socio-economic transformations produce inequality across a range of settings — financial markets, workplaces, labor markets, and digital platforms — drawing on statistical and computational methods. Across these projects, I work to advance a relational understanding of inequality that departs from the traditional focus on individual attributes and bring sociological theories and large-scale data into close conversation
My current projects ask what can large language models measure that we have not been able to measure before and how do people reason about a future they cannot know.
Biography
Ken-Hou Lin is Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a faculty associate of the Population Research Center and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Business, Government and Society at the McCombs School of Business.
His research examines how large-scale economic transformation — the expansion of finance, the reorganization of work, and the spread of digital platforms — reshapes the distribution of resources and opportunity. He is the coauthor of Divested: Inequality in the Age of Finance (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance (University of California Press, 2021). His articles appear in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Demography, Organization Science, and the Annual Review of Sociology.
He is Editor-in-Charge of Socio-Economic Review, the journal of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and has served as deputy editor of Demography and on the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces. His research has been supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Joyce Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and the City of Austin.
He is a recipient of the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award and the Outstanding Article Award, both from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility. He has received the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award and the Iverson Award for Innovation in Teaching.
Selected Honors
- 2024
- President's Associates Teaching Excellence AwardUniversity of Texas at Austin
- 2023
- William Julius Wilson Early Career AwardASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section
- 2022
- Iverson Award for Innovation in TeachingUniversity of Texas at Austin
- 2022
- Honorable Mention, Goode Book AwardASA Family Section
- 2020
- Finalist, Robert W. Hamilton Book AwardsUniversity of Texas at Austin
- 2018
- Visiting ResearcherMax Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies
- 2016–2017
- Barbara Pierce Bush Regents Professorship in Liberal ArtsUniversity of Texas at Austin
- 2014
- Outstanding Article AwardASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section
