Tamás Keller

I am an empirical sociologist and a scholar of social and educational inequality.

I earned my PhD in Sociology from Corvinus University of Budapest, spent my postdoctoral years at the Free University of Berlin and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, and received additional training in quantitative methods at the University of Essex, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the University of Cambridge, the University of Bamberg, and GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.

I am currently a tenured senior research fellow at the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences (ELTE TK) and the ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies (ELTE KRTK). I have been a visiting researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center (2022, 2025) and at Sciences Po, Paris (2024).

My research examines how individuals are shaped by their beliefs and how these beliefs contribute to the production and persistence of inequality. I investigate these questions across a broad range of topics, including educational track choice, gender and ethnic inequality in education, peer effects, and dishonest behavior. I conduct large-scale randomized experiments, analyze population registers, and survey data.

My work has appeared in leading sociological, economic, and educational journals, including the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Science, European Sociological Review, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Education Economics, among other high-impact journals.

I am an advocate of research transparency and open science. My studies are pre-registered with the AEA RCT Registry of the American Economic Association. The data and analytical code underlying my research are publicly available on my Open Science Framework page.