Daniel Lobo (he/they) is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, with specializations in political economy and the sociology of organizations and markets (joint with the Management of Organizations (MORS) group at the Haas School of Business). As an economic sociologist, his research examines how organizational and cultural processes—particularly around race, merit, and fairness—structure labor market outcomes and reproduce broader income and wealth inequalities. He focuses on how elite institutions assign value to individuals through hiring and evaluation practices, and how these practices, in turn, shape mobility and stratification. He also studies the social and relational costs of upward mobility, asking what individuals must relinquish in terms of identity and community to advance economically. Across these areas, he uses a mixed-methods approach, including interviews, surveys, field experiments, and computational techniques.

Daniel's research on racialized fairness has been published in the American Political Science Review. He has several ongoing projects focused on inequality in undergraduate data science education, a rapidly growing STEM field. His dissertation research, tentatively titled “Towards a theory on the causes, contours, and consequences of 'culture add' (as opposed to 'culture fit') hiring in elite firms,” uses qualitative and experimental methods to determine the extent to which this emergent evaluation paradigm may or may not reduce labor market inequality.

Daniel's research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, and the Berkeley Haas Institute for Business Innovation. He holds an A.B. in Social Studies, with high honors, from Harvard College and a M.A. in Sociology from UC Berkeley. Outside of academia, Daniel enjoys hiking, lifting, traveling, live music, meditation, all things Oakland, and spending time with loved ones. He identifies as Black (ethnically Cape Verdean), queer, and of the working class. He is also a first-generation American and college graduate.

Selected Publications

Lobo, Daniel and Ryan Brutger. 2025. "Fairness According to Whom? Divergent Perceptions of Fairness among White and Black Americans and Its Effect on Trade Attitudes."American Political Science Review, First View, p. 1-14. [link]