Research in Social Stratification and Mobility最新文献

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.

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.

There remains a lack of clarity about the effect of temporary employment on wages. Using asymmetric fixed effects models with a dummy impact function, we study the wage effects of four distinct transitions: (1) from unemployment into a temporary relative to (2) a permanent contracts; and (3) from temporary into permanent contracts relative to (4) from permanent into temporary contracts. We use panel data from eight countries to examine the effect of these distinct transitions, over time after the transition occurs, and in a cross-national, comparative context. The main finding explains the wage penalty of temporary employment identified by previous research. The negative effect is more accurately understood as the difference between two types of transitions, neither of which are negative, even if transitions from temporary into permanent contracts more positive than transitions from permanent into temporary contracts. There is little difference in the wage effect of transitions from unemployment into temporary relative to permanent contracts. The findings may be counter intuitive, but they are consistent with the theory of equalizing differences.

Unemployment may severely impede access to (good) jobs. We focus on the effects of unemployment scarring on the chances of young workers to get hired and evaluate the extent to which they are affected in labor markets with different levels of unemployment. Drawing on Goffman’s work on stigmatization and on queuing theory, we derive two potentially complementary micro-level explanations with opposing macro-level implication. We address the variation in unemployment scarring across 20 labor markets in four European countries based on factorial survey experiments embedded in real hiring situations. The results suggest that in labor markets with persistently low levels of unemployment, stigmatization, as proposed by Goffman, is the main source of unemployment scarring. We find no evidence that unemployment scarring is weaker when unemployment and the number of job seekers are low, as we inferred from queuing approaches. Our study contributes to expanding knowledge of context variability in unemployment scarring.

Augmenting the conceptual and methodological approaches that are common in current mobility research, we are proposing a dynamic approach to the analysis of intergenerational mobility. A multilevel model is developed that embeds differences and changes in individual resources, such as respondents’ class origin, educational attainment, and labor force experience, in the time-varying macro context of a changing cohort size, socio-economic modernization, and business cycles. The empirical analysis combines longitudinal career data from two German life history studies with time series data from official statistics and identifies the mechanisms behind the dynamics of intergenerational mobility processes by means of event history analysis. For the 1945–2008 period, the hypotheses of our theoretical model are supported empirically for daughters and sons born between 1929 and 1971. Their educational distribution is a particularly important factor for their vertical social mobility. Career duration also affects intergenerational mobility. Processes of intergenerational mobility are significantly shaped by time-dependent processes of socio-economic modernization and labor market conditions, which are affected by business cycle fluctuations that act as both push and pull factors on social class positions at labor market entry (cohort effect) and at all later career stages (period effect). Cohort size, which is assumed to increase competition in the career process, reduces upward mobility. Finally, when controlling for all these time-dependent mechanisms of social mobility, significant effects of social origin on offspring’s class positions in their life course remain. In particular, upward mobility and class reproduction dominate descents across cohorts and periods.

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.

In this article, we examine the gendered outcomes of career negotiations, which involve employees discussing career advancements with their direct supervisors. We apply relational inequality theory, which conceptualizes career negotiations as instances of relational claims-making, to explain gender differences in returns in terms of hourly wages, occupational status, and subjective perceptions of job advancements. Our empirical approach employs individual fixed-effect models using three waves of unique German linked employer-employee panel data on 2090 employees across 131 workplaces (LEEP-B3; 2012–2019). We find that men discussing career advancements with supervisors, experience pay raises and occupational upward mobility, whereas women do not. Yet, we find only minor gender differences in perceived job advancements following career negotiations. In workplaces with a more balanced gender representation in management and supervisory positions, women’s wage returns from negotiations increase. Although individual negotiations seem to perpetuate gender inequalities, workplace structures can weaken inequality-generating mechanisms.

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.