Research in Social Stratification and Mobility最新文献

The use of private tutoring to enhance academic outcomes has proliferated across the globe over recent decades. Despite increased scholarly interest in these so-called shadow education activities, the understanding of how education system features relate to the prevalence of shadow education is relatively limited. Moreover, regional variation of private tutoring within countries remains largely overlooked. This study exploits the federalist structure of Switzerland's education system to investigate how education system features incentivise or discourage participation in private tutoring. Based on a subjective expected utility framework and drawing on data from two large-scale assessment studies, the analyses reveal a substantial regional variation in participation rates in private tutoring. Multilevel regression models provide evidence that the institutional modalities of selection into general secondary education contribute to this variation and the social inequalities in the use of private tutoring.

Despite the steady increase in women’s labor force participation, there are still substantial cross-country variations in women’s rates of gainful employment and gender-linked occupational inequality. Utilizing micro-data for 41 countries (circa 2013) obtained from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS, 2023), we examine the extent to which globalization and each of its three components – economic, social, and political – affect gender-based economic inequality. Specifically, we investigate the effects of globalization and each of its components on two outcomes: the relative odds of women’s labor force participation, and of their obtaining lucrative managerial and professional jobs (vertical segregation). The findings establish a positive relationship between globalization and the relative odds of women participating in the work force. However, there is also a negative relationship between globalization and women’s odds of obtaining lucrative managerial and professional jobs. The findings also indicate that social globalization is more consequential for gender inequality in the labor market than either economic or political globalization. We discuss the findings in light of theory and previous research on globalization and gender-based inequality.

Since the mid-1970s, there has been a sharp rise in the prevalence of “bad jobs” in the U.S. labor market, characterized by stagnant wages, unstable work schedules, and limited fringe benefits. Scholarly, policy, and public debate persists, however, about whether these jobs can serve as steppingstones to intra-generational job quality mobility or are instead “poverty traps.” While scholarship increasingly recognizes the multi-dimensional nature of job quality, prior research on intra-generational job mobility overwhelmingly estimates only wage mobility and generally focuses on estimating the degree of mobility, to the exclusion of the contexts and mechanisms that foster such mobility. We draw on new panel data collected from 8600 hourly service sector workers between 2017 and 2022 to estimate short-run mobility into good jobs, defined as paying at least $15/hour, having a stable work schedule, and offering paid sick leave, employer-sponsored health insurance, and retirement benefits. Overall, we find that mobility into such “good jobs” is low. However, we show that the rate of transition into “good jobs” is strongly conditioned by local labor market conditions: during the “Great Resignation” and in low state-month unemployment periods, nearly twice the share of workers transitioned to “good jobs” as in less favorable contexts, particularly workers who changed sector as opposed to staying at the same firm or taking new jobs in the service sector. Notably, during periods of labor market tightness, workers who stayed at the same employer had similar rates of mobility into “good jobs” as those who changed employers within the sector.

We unite two interrelated bodies of work – a growing literature on sexual orientation earnings gaps and a rich tradition of research on intragenerational career trajectories – to examine how labor markets and life courses interact to produce gender and sexual orientation inequalities over time. We use the 1982–2019 Canadian Longitudinal Administrative Databank, a unique longitudinal database constructed from tax records, to answer core questions about the mechanisms that underlie sexual orientation earnings inequality. Growth curve models reveal how sexual orientation earnings gaps evolve over time spent in the workforce, and how they relate to differences in demographic and work characteristics for those in same- and different-sex couples at various points in the life course. We find that sexual orientation earnings gaps converge and diverge at unique career stages for men and women, and at each stage relate to unique mechanisms, especially work characteristics and family status. We find little significant variation in average earnings trajectories by sexual orientation across cohorts who were subject to differing legal and social environments surrounding sexual orientation.

Most studies on the changing socioeconomic gradient of divorce have operationalized individuals’ socioeconomic status (SES) through education, often neglecting social class differences. Education may proxy cultural and cognitive skills, whereas social class could more accurately capture economic means. Additionally, existing research has predominantly focused on women and marital dissolutions. This study addresses these oversights by analyzing the educational and social class gradients of both marriage and cohabitation dissolutions among men and women in Italy—a latecomer to the Second Demographic Transition. We used non-proportional hazard models to estimate survival curves and union dissolution probabilities stratified by education, social class, and cohort. Our findings reveal a vanishing socioeconomic gradient of marital dissolution among women and a reversal from positive to negative among men across cohorts. These results challenge the conventional view that men’s higher SES always stabilizes unions and support Goode’s hypothesis on the reversal of the socioeconomic gradient of divorce for both genders. No clear SES gradient was found for cohabiting unions. Overall, the study demonstrates the significant predictive power of social class for marital dissolutions, even when controlling for education, emphasizing the need to consider both measures of SES to comprehensively account for different underlying mechanisms.

This article investigates whether empirical studies have underestimated the social origin pay gap by omitting respondents with undefined social origins. Specifically, individuals that were not assigned a social origin because the identity of their parental household was unclear, nobody was earning in the household, or the occupational identity of the main wage earner could not be identified. Data from the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey is analysed to establish the prevalence of undefined social origins and the extent to which the socioeconomic characteristics of these groups are different from those who can be identified using the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC). The results show that 10.5% of the working age population have undefined social origins and that the labour market outcomes of these people are worse than those with defined social origins. Results show that omitting these respondents underestimates the range of the social origin pay gap and the number of people affected.

This study examines the role of genes and environments in predicting educational outcomes. We test the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis, suggesting that enriched environments enable genetic potential to unfold, and the compensatory advantage hypothesis, proposing that low genetic endowments have less impact on education for children from high socioeconomic status (SES) families. We use a pre-registered design with Netherlands Twin Register data (426 ≤ N_individuals ≤ 3875). We build polygenic indexes (PGIs) for cognitive and noncognitive skills to predict seven educational outcomes from childhood to adulthood across three designs (between-family, within-family, and trio) accounting for different confounding sources, totalling 42 analyses. Cognitive PGIs, noncognitive PGIs, and parental education positively predict educational outcomes. Providing partial support for the compensatory hypothesis, 39/42 PGI × SES interactions are negative, with 7 reaching statistical significance under Romano-Wolf and 3 under the more conservative Bonferroni multiple testing corrections (p-value < 0.007). In contrast, the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis lacks empirical support, with just 2 non-significant and 1 significant (not surviving Romano-Wolf) positive interactions. Overall, we emphasise the need for future replication studies in larger samples. Our findings demonstrate the value of merging social-stratification and behavioural-genetic theories to better understand the intricate interplay between genetic factors and social contexts.

This paper depicts the evolution of gaps in academic performance between native and immigrant background students as they progress from primary to secondary education. We study three cohorts of students in European and traditional English-speaking immigration countries using combinations of international assessment studies (PIRLS, TIMSS and PISA). To address the issue of comparability of test scores across surveys and over time, we exploit rank-based measures of relative performance, which only require ordinal comparability of the data. We do not find significant differences between the academic achievements of immigrant children and their native-born peers in English-speaking receiving countries. By contrast, immigrant-background children – both of first- and of second-generation – exhibit a large achievement gap in primary school in Europe, even when accounting for observable differences in socioeconomic characteristics. The gap tends to narrow down in secondary education in both reading and mathematics but is not fully absorbed in most countries. This finding is noteworthy among second-generation students in systems with early tracking. The performance of students with mixed parents is not markedly different from native students. Diverging educational progress between immigrant children in traditional immigration countries and our sample of European countries seems to reinforce the importance of the initial socioeconomic endowment in shaping the academic trajectories of immigrant children.

Measures of objective and subjective social status are commonly used in social stratification research. While objective measures have been extensively examined for cross-national comparability, subjective indicators have received less attention. This study aims to address this research gap by investigating the measurement invariance of the three most commonly used single-item measures of subjective social status across many countries. Using a Bayesian approximation approach, we analysed data from three waves of the International Social Survey Programme conducted between 1999 and 2019. The analyses showed that our composite measure is a relatively reliable and stable construct when compared internationally. However, some single-item measures were not invariant across countries or survey rounds, suggesting that the average of a given single measure of subjective status or the relationship between it and other variables should not be compared across countries. Finally, the study showed that a subjective status item with a 10-step numerical ladder seems to be more appropriate for cross-country comparisons, showing low variation across countries. To improve the validity of future research, we recommend that at least three questions measuring subjective social status be included in international questionnaires and that subjective status be used as a latent construct whenever possible and appropriate.

The norm in which wives usually undertake a greater share of household labor than their husbands in China is deeply rooted in the fact that historically, women were of a much lower educational, social, and economic status than men. One significant change in recent decades is that the rapid improvement in women’s educational attainment has increased the share of marriages in which the wife has more education than the husband. Does the division of household labor vary among couples of diverse education pairings? How does living with parents – a common living arrangement in China – weaken or strengthen this traditional norm? We explore these questions using data from the China Family Panel Studies conducted in the 2010s. Focusing on recently married couples with young children, we show that homogamous couples in which both spouses have high school or college education and hypogamous couples in which the wife has the educational advantage have the most equitable division of household labor. Co-residence with parents does not alleviate the gender gap for most couples, but living with paternal parents tends to reduce the housework for lower educated daughters-in-law while living with maternal parents appears to benefit daughters who have one-level education more than their husbands. This study reveals reduced gender inequality in housework among the homogamous and hypogamous couples, but gender division remains strong overall, despite improvement in women’s educational attainment and potential support from paternal or maternal parents through co-residences.