Join the Stone Center as we host Doron Shiffer-Sebba , Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, on Tuesday, March 24, as he presents, "The Family Office: Wealth Elite and their Family Management."

Please RSVP to save your seat.

Abstract: Today’s richest Americans have amassed fortunes rivaled only by estates like Rockefeller and Carnegie, with some arguing that the United States has reached a “New Gilded Age”. Accordingly, scholars have studied the social and legal mechanisms through which individuals accumulate large fortunes. Yet we know little about how elites maintain their economic resources as families, passing their wealth across generations. Using six months of ethnographic observation at a wealth manager that caters to top 0.1% wealthy families in the United States, I argue that the legal system, which focuses on nuclear families but largely ignores extended family ties, incentivizes using tools, like trusts and corporations, that disperse wealth across family members. These tools then augment the role of family members and professionals in elite wealth management. They preserve elite wealth but, paradoxically, also limit their control. Dynamics within elite families and between families and professionals have far-reaching consequences for the distribution of elite wealth and subsequent patterns of inequality.

Doron Shiffer-Sebba researches the intersection of extended families and economic inequality. He focuses on 1) elite wealthy families and how they organize their wealth; 2) the role of extended families in economic inequality in the broader U.S. population; and 3) developing novel computational methods to analyze how people use their bodies in social interaction. In doing so, Doron employs a wide array of methodological perspectives -- ethnographic, quantitative, and computational. Doron is currently working on an ethnographic book manuscript that exposes the structural forces that keep economic elites wealthy and thus sustaining inequality. Before joining Northwestern's sociology department, Doron completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern.