Ole Hexel's research examines the causes and consequences of economic inequality in Europe and the United States. He explores when and how parents support their children financially, using survey data. He also works on population-level descriptions of kin structure and wealth inequality, using register data. He uses techniques from survey analysis, network analysis and simulation.

His research has been published in PNAS. He is currently a post-doc at the Laboratory for Digital and Computational Demography at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. He has obtained a PhD and an MA in Sociology from Northwestern University and from the Institut d'études politiques de Paris.