Louis-André Vallet

Louis-André Vallet is Emeritus Research Professor of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and works in Sorbonne University (Paris) at the GEMASS – Groupe d’étude des méthodes de l’analyse sociologique de la Sorbonne.

He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Paris-Sorbonne under the supervision of Raymond Boudon on the intergenerational social mobility of women in France. He was an assistant professor at the Catholic University of Angers (1981-1993) and worked in the statistical department of the French Ministry of Education (1994). After entering the CNRS, Louis-André Vallet has worked within the Laboratory for Secondary Analysis and Methods Applied to Sociology (1996-2003), then in the Quantitative Sociology Unit of the Center for Economics and Statistics associated with the French Statistical Office (2003-2013), and the Observatoire Sociologique du Changement in Sciences Po (2013-2021). He was the French representative within the Steering Committee of the “Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences I and II” research networking programs run by the European Science Foundation (2003-2012).

His work, primarily published in French sociological journals and journals associated with the French statistical system, has notably demonstrated trends in social fluidity and inequality of educational opportunity within French society (see especially “Forty Years of Social Mobility in France. Change in Social Fluidity in the Light of Recent Models”, Revue Française de Sociologie. An Annual English Selection, 2001, 42: 5-64). Louis-André Vallet’s work about France also appeared in several comparative volumes, notably the Social Mobility in Europe 2004 book, the Determined to Succeed? 2013 book that studied the relative importance of primary and secondary effects of social origin in educational inequalities and its change over time, and the Education and Intergenerational Social Mobility book that studied change in social mobility over cohorts and the importance of educational change for social fluidity change (2020, Stanford University Press).