Pettinicchio, David - Centre for Global Social Policy

David Pettinicchio is Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, affiliated with the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and author of Politics of Empowerment (Stanford) and Sixty Years of Visible Protest in the Disability Struggle for Equality, Justice, and Inclusion (Cambridge). He serves as Interim Department Chair at the University of Toronto Mississauga and was Associate Chair of the tri-campus graduate programme.

Pettinicchio’s research examines how social policy is implemented, with emphasis on disability, care, and economic insecurity. In work on disability hiring policy, he has led a multi-stage audit study combining evaluator experiments, HR-professional assessments, and a field experiment showing how discrimination varies by occupation and disability signal. Building on this agenda, he is testing algorithmic screening to assess whether AI hiring systems reproduce, mitigate, or amplify bias against disabled applicants. He also analyzes how quota systems and sheltered-workshop arrangements can sustain segregated employment and precarity, including in a report commissioned by the European Trade Union Institute.

A second research stream focuses on the provision of care and its consequences for household wellbeing. Using proprietary long-term care data with over 19 million cases, he links residents’ health trajectories to facility characteristics and local policy regimes to identify leverage points for reform. His cross-national surveys show how disability and caregiving shape employment and perceived economic insecurity across Sweden, Italy, Germany, and the UK, and how welfare supports condition these ties. His COVID-19 research shows how disabled people experienced precarity and policy exclusion.