Yu Xie

Early Life, Education, and Academic Career

Xie was born in Zhenjiang(镇江), China in 1959, the second of two brothers. His parents were both physicians. Xie’s education was delayed by the Cultural Revolution in China, and his family suffered many hardships, but after the Revolution ended, he was accepted at Shanghai University of Technology, where he received a B.S. in Metallurgical Engineering in 1982. He then came to the United States to study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from which he received an M.A. in the History of Science and an M.S. in Sociology in 1984 as well as a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1989. After completing his doctorate, Xie came to the University of Michigan as an assistant professor, where he was appointed associate professor in 1994 and full professor in 1996. He became an American citizen in 1997. Xie now lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and their two children, and his parents and brother also live in the U.S.

Along with his sociology appointment, Xie has held various positions in other departments at the University of Michigan. He was appointed Professor of Statistics in 2000 and Professor of Public Policy in 2011. Xie is also a Research Professor at the Population Studies Center and the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research, and a Faculty Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies. Since 1999, he has been directing the Quantitative Methodology Program at the Survey Research Center. During his over twenty years of service at the University of Michigan, Xie has been honored with multiple chair professorships. In 2007, he was appointed Otis Dudley Duncan University Distinguished Professor.

In recent years, Xie has been active in promoting empirical sociology in China. His primary institutional affiliation in China has been with Peking University, where he has directed the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), China’s largest national longitudinal social science data collection project and founded the Social Research Center. Xie has also been active at several other institutions in China, holding honorary adjunct professorships at Renmin University of China, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Shanghai University.

Research and Selected Publications

Xie specializes in quantitative methodology, social stratification, demography, China studies, and sociology of science. He has published scholarly articles in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Demography, Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Economic Review, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and many others.

Quantitative Methodology

Xie has developed a series of statistical procedures for categorical data analysis. His log-multiplicative layer-effect model (a.k.a. unidiff model), in particular, has been widely used in comparative (historical or international) tabular analysis. He also extended the model to the Coale-Trussell method in fertility studies and to event-history analysis. His textbook, Statistical Methods for Categorical Data Analysis, coauthored with Daniel Powers, systematically introduced various methods in categorical data analysis under a unified framework, which had become an important reference in social science methodology. Xie’s recent methodological work includes discrete choice models for friendship choice, causal inference based on observational data, and population heterogeneity.

Social Stratification

Xie has contributed extensively to the field of social stratification. In particular, his research on immigrants in the U.S. has contributed important empirical knowledge in terms of education, occupation, income, health, and family. For example, he found that although Asian Americans excelled in achieving socioeconomic status through education, the returns to their education greatly depended on the location of education—those who received education outside of the U.S. were still disadvantaged in terms of income. In the census-based monograph A Demographic Portrait of Asian Americans, Xie and co-author Kimberly Goyette systematically documented the socioeconomic differences between Asian Americans and other ethno-racial groups as well as the heterogeneity within the Asian American population. With Jennie Brand, Xie proposed that persons who are most unlikely to attend college would benefit financially from college education. His recent work with Alexandra Killewald refuted Long and Ferrie’s claim that social mobility has significantly declined in the U.S. since the nineteenth century net of historical changes to the share of farmers in the labor force.

Demography

Besides methodological contributions in his early career, Xie has also engaged in substantive studies on fertility, mortality, migration, and the family. His collaborative work with Arland Thornton and William Axinn in Marriage and Cohabitation evaluated various determinants of marriage and cohabitation along the individual life course. In a review article on the discipline of demography for Journal of the American Statistical Association, Xie traced the development of statistical methods in population studies. He has also written extensively on immigrants to the U.S. and their children, highlighting substantial heterogeneity of the assimilation process due to ethnic origin, local context, and social outcomes.

China Studies

Xie’s research on China focuses mainly on documenting and explaining social inequalities in Chinese society. He has identified important stratifying mechanisms such as temporal and geographic regimes, as well as work unit (a.k.a. danwei), the unique collective agent in the distribution of income and benefits in urban China. His research on the Chinese family and demography includes aging and mortality, household resources distribution, marriage patterns, and household division of labor. In addition, Xie has contributed to Chinese social history, ranging from the influences of the Cultural Revolution on sent-down youths to the dual accountability of state officials in the Han Dynasty.

Xie is instrumental in promoting the development of empirical sociology in China today. Since the 2000s, he has frequently visited and worked at various universities in China. Over the years, he has trained a large number of Chinese students and young scholars in Michigan, Hong Kong, and Beijing. At Peking University, in particular, he has organized summer schools and academic conferences on social science methodology, directed the CFPS data collection project, and founded the Social Research Center as a premier research center dedicated to conducting empirical sociological research on contemporary China.

Sociology of Science

Xie has published two books on American science. Xie’s 2003 book with Kimberlee Shauman examined the educational and career pathways of women scientists and was well received in the science community. Unfortunately, a misinterpretation of the results from the book by Lawrence Summers led Summers to a controversy that might have contributed to his resigning his position as president of Harvard University. His 2012 book with Alexandra Killewald assesses the state of American science, drawing on systematic data from a large range of sources on science education and occupations in the U.S. since WWII. The book addresses the debate on whether American science has been in decline. More recently, he has been interested in the development of science in China.

Professional recognitions

Books