Lai Wei
Assistant Professor and HKU-100 Scholar
Department of Sociology
The University of Hong Kong
The University of Hong Kong
How do families help create and maintain social inequality
How do people perceive the society and their positions in it
How to apply causal thinking in analyzing social stratification
How to use AI to enhance survey and survey-based research
E-mail: laiw@hku.hk
Address: 9/20 Jockey Club Tower, HKU, HK SAR, China
Education
PhD in Sociology, Princeton University, 2018 - 2024
BA in Sociology, Tsinghua University, 2014 - 2018
Publications (*equal authorship)
Boyan Zheng and Lai Wei. "Two-Dimensional Stratification of Subjective Social Status in China from 2006 to 2021: A New Perspective on Objective-Subjective Status Alignment." Chinese Sociological Review (2025)
Lai Wei and Yu Xie. "Social Mobility as Causal Intervention." Sociological Methods & Research (2025)
Aleksei Opacic*, Lai Wei*, and Xiang Zhou*. "Disparity Analysis: A Tale of Two Approaches." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (2025)
Liying Luo and Lai Wei. "For Whom Does Education Convey Health Benefits? A Two-Generation Life Course Approach." Journal of Health and Social Behavior (2024)
Lai Wei. "When the Wall is Broken: Rural-to-Urban Migration, Perceived Inequality, and Subjective Social Status in China." Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (2022)
Lai Wei, Elaine Yao, and Han Zhang. "Authoritarian Responsiveness and Political Attitudes during COVID-19: Evidence from Weibo and a Survey Experiment." Chinese Sociological Review (2021)
Under Review
Lai Wei. "Treatment Effect on the Association between Outcomes", Conditional Acceptance, Sociological Methods & Research
Lai Wei. "Labor Market Transformation and Effectively Maintained Immobility in the US." R & R, American Journal of Sociology
Fumiya Uchikoshi* and Lai Wei*. "Does College Education Mitigate Assortative Mating by Family Origin"
Lai Wei. "Explaning Association with RIF Regression"
Lai Wei and Yifei Zhu. "Using AI Predictions to Augment Rather Than Replacing Surveys"
Selected Works in Progress
Lai Wei and Xi Song. "College Education and Intergenerational Mobility Revisited: A Prospective Approach"
Lai Wei. "Adaptive Questionnaire Splitting"
Lai Wei. "Decomposing Between-Group Difference in Outcome Association"
Teaching
SOCI2030, Quantitative Research Methods, HKU
SOCI2095, Quantitative Social Science: From Correlation to Causality, HKU
MPOP7004, Methods for Policy Evalutaion, HKU
Selected Professional Recognition
HKU-100 Scholarship HKU, 2024-2030
Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship, Princeton University, 2023
Honorable Mention, Nan Lin Award, ICSA, 2023
Aage B. Sørensen Award, RC28 Spring, 2022