Research in Social Stratification and Mobility最新文献

Inequalities in parental investments can shape inequalities in children’s outcomes and life chances. Scholars have theorized how socioeconomic status (SES) may moderate how parents use parental investments to respond to the loss of the provision of public schooling during the summer. We investigate the seasonality of SES gaps in parental investments of both money and time in the United States using the 1996–2019 Consumer Expenditure Survey and the 2003–2019 American Time Use Survey. We find SES gaps in parental investments of both money and time during the summer, and that SES gaps in expenditures are larger in the summer than during non-summer months. We find little evidence that any of these gaps have grown substantially over time. Finally, we find evidence that SES gaps in summer paternal investments of time are driven by investments in younger rather than older school-aged children. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the link between public and parental investments in children, address a key mechanism in the debate about the summer learning gap, and provide new evidence on how parents may target investments in children towards the ages when they are most consequential.

Declines in union density explain a considerable portion of rising US inequality among unionized and non-unionized workers. However, how union density regulates non-union wages is mainly speculative. I test the moral economy hypothesis that union density reduces inequality, in part, by fostering egalitarian wage norms that regulate compensation practices and redistributive policies. Variance function regressions suggest that wage norms may explain 12% of union density decline effects on rising within-group wage inequality between 1983 and 2018. Findings provide support for the moral economy perspective and an empirical foundation for the causal relationship between unions and inequality.

This paper studies in longitudinal perspective the direct effect of social origin (DESO) on the careers of women in Italy, focusing on the role of motherhood in shaping the DESO and its pattern over the life course. Career outcomes are seen in terms of employment interruptions and of occupational status. First, the paper analyzes when the DESO appears, and how it evolves over the occupational career and the life course. Second, it investigates whether and how motherhood shapes the magnitude and trend over the career of the DESO. Results, based on growth curve models, show that the DESO in occupational status already appears at first job, and then slightly changes over the life course, whereas the social origin gap in the probability of career breaks is small in the first years after labour market entry and then increases. Parenthood does not help to explain the DESO because women from low social origin are more likely to have children than women from high social origin. Rather, it contributes to the increase of the DESO over the life course because of different career trajectories after motherhood, with higher risks to leave employment among women from the lower classes and (slightly) higher occupational premia among women from the service class.

Children born into poverty in rural America achieve higher average income levels as adults than their urban peers. As economic opportunity tends to be more abundant in cities, this "rural advantage" in income mobility seems paradoxical. This article resolves this puzzle by applying multilevel analysis to new spatial measures of rurality and place-level data on intergenerational income mobility. We show that the high level of rural income mobility is principally driven by boys of rural-origin, who are more likely than their urban peers to grow up in communities with a predominance of two-parent households. The rural advantage is most pronounced among Whites and Hispanics, as well as those who were raised in the middle of the country. However, these dynamics are more nuanced for girls. In fact, girls from lower-income rural households exhibit a disadvantage in their personal income attainment, partly due to the persistence of traditional gender norms. These findings underscore the importance of communities with strong household and community supports in facilitating later-life income mobility, particularly for boys. They also challenge the emerging consensus that attributes the rural income mobility advantage to migration from poorer rural areas to wealthier towns and cities.

In recent years, refugee women’s experiences have received considerable attention in the academic discourse on immigrant labor market integration. Taking a dynamic perspective, we investigate gender differences in the labor market integration of refugees who arrived in Germany between 2013 and 2019. We examine refugees' trajectories in the early post-arrival period and explore a number of conditions that have been proposed to influence gendered labor market outcomes. Using panel data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Refugee Sample, we find initially narrow gender differences among refugees that gradually widen over time. While initial differences in human capital and care responsibilities contribute significantly to the gender gap in employment in the first year after arrival, our study shows that the gap widens primarily due to refugee women experiencing lower returns to their human and social capital and health, as well as bearing a heavier burden of childcare responsibilities. These findings highlight the compounded disadvantages that refugee women face in the host country due to their limited ability to fully utilize their labor market resources, coupled with their primary responsibility for childcare. Moreover, our findings suggest that existing theoretical explanations in the literature are insufficient to fully explain the barriers refugee women face when entering the labor market.

Labour market outcomes of ethnic minorities tend to be lower compared to members of the majority population. Better education obtained in the host country has the potential to mitigate such ethnic labour market disadvantage. In this study, we will focus on the role of family, neighbourhood and school characteristics in the achievement of tertiary education among the minority population. Our empirical context is the capital city of Estonia, Tallinn, and its wider urban region. Tallinn Urban Region makes for an interesting case because of the high share of the minority population, modest immigration over the past three decades, and high levels segregation in different life domains, in neighbourhoods, schools and in the labour market. We apply a longitudinal study design to examine the factors that are related to the achievement of tertiary education among second and third generation immigrants. We find that studying in schools together with majority population students is associated with obtaining a university degree, when controlling for parental characteristics. However, levels of ethnic segregation in the childhood neighbourhood are not related to achieving tertiary education, but living in a neighbourhood with a higher share of tertiary-educated people is. Also, a higher level of social integration among minority children, but not immigrant generation, is positively associated with achieving tertiary education.

Most of the economic and sociological literature focuses on the role of social origin background on class, or wage outcomes. Yet, two individuals may have similar wages, but very different market incomes, so that the role of social origin may differ between these two individuals. This paper aims to explore the social origin associations – net of individual occupation – on two types of monetary outcomes: standard annual salaries and market income. The study compares Spain and Germany to analyse variations in social origin associations within their distinct labour market structures and institutional frameworks. Using unconditional quantile regressions, the findings reveal that Spain exhibits a significant “residual effect of social origins” on both wage and market income. Spain also demonstrates significant class-ceiling effects, signalling barriers to upward mobility. Conversely, Germany shows a limited residual origin correlation and no significant class barriers, aligning well with the human capital theory. Additionally, Spain experiences a significant increase in inequality between 2002 and 2017, primarily attributed to changes in the characteristics of the labour market structure. On the other hand, Germany is again found to be a more mobile country with no significant dynamic changes in inequalities.

Despite increased scholarly and policy interest in income inequality, our knowledge of inequality in later life is relatively limited. One challenge to studying inequality in older age groups is that income sources that are important in later life, including pensions and retirement accounts, may be poorly captured by household income surveys. In this study, we investigate income inequality among the older population in the United States, focusing on how measurement error affects retirement income estimates and its impact on summary measures of inequality. We use a rich dataset that links respondents in the Survey of Income and Program Participation with restricted-use administrative records from the Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service. We find systematic, nonclassical measurement error in survey-reported retirement income, particularly from pensions and retirement accounts. Due to these patterns of measurement error, income inequality estimates are considerably higher using administrative records instead of survey-reported data. Additional analyses show the effects of measurement error when estimating between- and within-group inequality across racial-ethnic and education groups. The downward bias associated with measuring income inequality among older Americans could worsen in the future given the shift from defined-benefit to defined-contribution retirement plans.

This article studies wage mobility during the early career in West Germany and the United States. We examine the extent of intragenerational wage fluctuations, whether they structure into upward mobility trends or remain volatile variations, and whether mobility aligns with classical stratification dimensions (gender, social origin, and education). We highlight three main findings. First, intragenerational wage fluctuations are stronger in the United States than in West Germany. Second, wage fluctuations translate into steeper trends of upward mobility, lower trend heterogeneity, and lower year-to-year volatility in West Germany than in the United States. Last, there is persistent intragenerational wage inequality by gender, social origin, and education but no striking differences between the patterns in the two countries. These results point toward the idea that higher wage fluctuations in the United States do not reflect opportunities for upward mobility but, rather, uncertainty around the prospects of wage progression.

The effect of social origin on educational expectations has mostly focused on adolescents. Yet, the expansion of higher education across the OECD area has made the transition from bachelor to master programs increasingly consequential for inequality of educational opportunities and social mobility. Applying multinomial logistic regression to data from a survey carried out in 2018 among university students in three Spanish regions, our research reveals the existence of a still meaningful effect of socioeconomic origin on expectations of postgraduate enrolment among university undergraduates, even after controlling for academic progression, performance and choice of field of study. In other words, the analysis provides evidence of a secondary effect of social origin on educational expectations at this late stage of the educational career. Multinomial logistic regression and the Karlson-Holm-Breen method applied to the same data also reveal the inexistence of a mediation effect of field of studies or academic performance. In this sense, our evidence points at a clearly higher weight of the secondary effect, rather than the primary effect of social origin, on the transmission of educational advantage to expectations of postgraduate enrolment among undergraduates. Yet, a moderating effect of both fields of studies and academic performance does exist. As regards field of studies, against our initial expectation, the effect of social origin turns out to be stronger in some fields of studies with better labour market access (strong fields). Regarding academic performance, the sensitiveness of postgraduate enrolment expectation to grades obtained so far decreases with social origin, thus revealing a lingering compensatory effect of social origin at the end of the educational trajectory.