Seth G. Sanders studies a range of topics in labor economics and economic demography including aging and cognition, race and gender gaps in earnings among the highly educated, the effects of extreme economic changes on workers and families, the performance of gay and lesbian families in the economy, and the economic consequences of teenage childbearing. His current census work includes work on the Core Longitudinal Infrastructure Project (CLIP) which is developing methods to link historic census data to contemporary census data and administrative records.

Professor Sanders was the research director of the first census research data center at Carnegie Mellon University and has worked with restricted use census data throughout his career. 

He co-authored Human Capital Investment: A History of Asian Immigrants and Their Family Ties. 

Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell, he was Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Duke University and Director of the Duke Population Research Institute. 

Professor Sanders received his undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.