Silvia Maja Melzer

Silvia Maja MELZER is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political & Social Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (Spain). She studied Sociology at the University Konstanz and started her doctoral degree at the Institute of Employment Research and finished it at the University of Bielefeld. She has worked as a deputizing full-professor for Social Inequality and Social Structure Analysis at the Bielefeld University, where she also had a Post-Doc and lecturer position.

Her research focuses on social structures, social inequality, careers at the labor market and quantitative research methods using Linked-employer-employee data. Moreover, workplaces and processes within workplaces are central in her research. She is currently co-directing the German Research Foundation project “Organizational Inequalities and Interdependencies between Capabilities in Work and Personal Life: A Study of Employees in Different Work Organizations” seeking to examine how firms create, mute and exaggerate income inequality. Since 2015, she also works as the country lead investigator for Germany within the Comparative Organizational Inequality Network (COIN), which investigates organizational earnings inequalities using Linked-employer-employee panel data for 14 countries. Recently she has published in the PNAS, Journal of Marriage and Family, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, and Social Forces.