Florencia Torche
Stanford University
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Primary Section: 53, Social and Political Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2020)
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Biosketch
Florencia Torche is a social demographer and a sociologist of stratification and mobility. She studies the determinants of health, educational attainment, and socioeconomic wellbeing across generations and over the life course. She has published widely on the effect of in-utero exposures to environmental stressors -natural disaster, local homicides, restrictive immigration policy, among others- on health and developmental outcomes at birth. This work spans diverse national contexts including the US, Chile, Israel, and Mexico. These studies use causal inference techniques to analyze administrative data linked to a wide array of contextual data. In addition to early-life determinants of wellbeing, Torche’s scholarship examines stratification processes over the life course including intergenerational mobility, educational attainment, marital sorting, and the impact of the economic and institutional context on socioeconomic wellbeing. She has led large data collection projects on life chances in several countries and have collaborated with scholars in different disciplines including economics and medical sciences.
Research Interests
Florencia Torche’s scholarship examines the persistence of inequality across generations, and the factors that contribute to or hamper intergenerational mobility. She has established two areas of research. The first one examines differences in intergenerational mobility across countries and the role that educational attainment plays in the persistence of inequality across generations. Her second area of research examines the effect of in-utero exposure to environmental stressors on children’s health, cognitive development, and educational attainment. Drawing on natural experiments in different countries she has demonstrated a detrimental effect of prenatal stress exposure on outcomes over the early life course. She has also shown that the harmful effect of prenatal stress is stronger among disadvantaged families, but it can be reduced through health-enhancing behavioral responses.
