Research in Social Stratification and Mobility最新文献

Can perceived employability mitigate the negative impacts of job insecurity on wellbeing?. We address this question using fixed-effects models on panel data from. Switzerland. To measure job insecurity, we use two subjective indicators (risk of job. loss and fear of job loss in the last year) and an objective one (having a temporary contract). We assess well-being by studying job satisfaction, life satisfaction, and mental health, and perform separate analyses for men and women. Results suggest that employability does not mitigate the impacts of job insecurity on job satisfaction. For life satisfaction, employability reduces the impacts of the risk of job loss in the last year, but only among men. Regarding mental health, employability partially offsets the impacts of the risk of job loss in the last year for both men and women. We conclude that even though employability might help, it does not shield workers from the negative impacts of job insecurity. This suggests that the flexicurity strategy falls short of mitigating the non-pecuniary impacts of job insecurity.

This article examines the impact of social origin on the returns to college education in the context of China’s higher education expansion since 1999. Utilizing a double-treatment setting, a marginal treatment effect framework is adopted to estimate the causal effect of college education on earnings, while a difference-in-differences methodology identifies the policy effect of educational expansion on the college premium. Analysis of data from a series of nationally representative Chinese surveys reveals that the “true” college earnings premium is rather small for the post-expansion cohort, and that much of the observed earnings gap between college and high school graduates after the expansion is due to returns to unobserved abilities. Further analysis shows that the college earnings premium after the expansion declines more for rural-origin children with schooling probabilities in the top percentiles than for their urban counterparts.

While the impact of boarding school on academic achievement has been extensively debated, the differential effects on distinct student groups divided institutionally have yet to be thoroughly explored. Moreover, previous studies focus on comparing boarding schools vs. day schools, which tend to suffer from bias due to the sorting processes of different school types. In this study, we employ the school-fixed effect model and inverse probability weighting approach to examine the association of boarding on middle-school students’ academic outcomes in China, where most schools have a mixed population of boarders and non-boarders. Based on the two waves of panel data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) in 2013 and 2014, we find that boarding is positively associated with students’ academic scores, particularly math and Chinese. Rural-origin students, including rural local students and rural migrant students, benefit more from living on campus. Reduced study distractions, such as housework and playing can partially explain this positive boarding effect. This study lends empirical support to the positive effect of boarding on academic performance among students who are segregated by Hukou and migration status in China.

We review research on social stratification and labor market institutions with a focus on typical East Asian practices versus common American perspectives about income inequalities. In contrast to American concerns about discrimination, equality of opportunity and individualism, the understanding of inequalities in East Asian societies is more influenced by a Confucian cultural tradition. East Asian norms and labor market institutions play an important role in reducing their level of household income inequality relative to the U.S. where the Gini coefficient has been increasing for decades and shows no signs of decreasing despite declining levels of discrimination.

Extracurricular activities in adolescence are associated with adolescents’ cognitive skills. While participation in extracurricular activities is stratified, it is unclear whether all adolescents benefit from such activities to the same extent. This study explores whether participation in extracurricular activities functions as an equalizer or reinforcer of inequalities by examining how different types of activities (music, sports, or both combined) are associated with cognitive skills in adolescents from families with less or more education. We use data from the German SOEP household panel study and employ propensity score techniques to address differential selection into activities. Our results show that participation in both activities combined is most strongly related to cognitive test scores, followed by music activities and sports. Further, the results show that adolescents with more educated parents show a stronger link between participation in both activities combined and cognitive test scores than adolescents from less educated families. The same pattern holds for sports, although estimates are less clear. In contrast, the link between participation in music and cognitive test scores shows no variation by parental background. Our findings indicate that the participation in extracurricular activities does not diminish the gap in cognitive skills between children from less and more educated families; in fact, involvement in both activities combined further widens this disparity. Hence, even if adolescents from different socioeconomic backgrounds participated in activities to the same extent, gaps in cognitive skills by parental education are not reduced, and extracurricular activities thus have the potential to reinforce social inequalities.

Research suggests that persons living with a disability are disadvantaged in terms of employment outcomes and experience greater economic vulnerability. Despite our understanding of wealth inequality in later life as the result of an accumulative process of resource acquisition that occurs across the life course, conclusions about economic inequality associated with disability are mainly based on cross-sectional research or very short-term panel studies. In this paper, we examine the extent to which work disability in mid-life creates a cumulative disadvantage in wealth accumulation that grows with age. Using long-term longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we follow respondents from their 40 s into their 60 s to understand the relationship between work disability and wealth accumulation over time. Growth curve models include two specifications of trajectories of household wealth accumulation; as a function of time-varying work disability and also as a function of cumulative exposure to work disability in mid-life. Although both specifications indicate a disability penalty to wealth accumulation, the cumulative exposure model shows that initial wealth disparities associated with disability grow substantially with age, resulting in a widening gap in household wealth at the threshold of traditional retirement age for those with histories of temporary or persistent work disability in midlife.

Although extant research persistently highlights the importance of information for educational decision-making, better understanding the existence of, and the underlying reasons for, informational differences between immigrant and non-immigrant parents is important. This study examines the differences in the level of information between immigrant and non-immigrant parents of third graders just before they make probably their most important educational decision in the German education system. We draw on approaches highlighting the importance of resources and parents’ acculturation to explain the informational differences between immigrant and non-immigrant parents. Employing linear regression and probability models on data from the National Educational Panel Study in Germany (N = 3961), we demonstrate that all immigrant groups, particularly those from Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East, and northern Africa, are significantly less informed than parents without own immigration experience. This result is evident both in our overall test and in various domains of the test, which analyze different aspects of information relevant to parents’ educational decision-making. Furthermore, different endowments with social and cultural capital largely explain the informational differences between parents with and without an immigrant background. In contrast, different acculturation strategies are almost negligible in explaining the differences in the level of information. Our findings provide important insights for research on migration-related inequalities in educational decision-making and for developing interventions to improve migrant parents’ ability to make well-informed and thus intended educational decisions.

The study of inequality of opportunity and its main drivers is a major task in the field of economics. This paper aims to estimate a comprehensive database of socio-economic variables for five African countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, and Nigeria) using imputation techniques, with the ultimate goal of approximating the degrees of intergenerational transmission and social mobility. To achieve this goal, the transition matrix methodology is used in three domains: education, occupation, and income. The results show that the domain with the highest levels of mobility, in general terms, is education, and the lowest, income. Key findings reveal significant variations in the levels of social mobility across these domains depending on the studied country, such as in income mobility with respect to parents: Ethiopia is at the top with a high percentage of individuals experiencing upward mobility, and Malawi at the bottom, with a high percentage of individuals experiencing downward mobility. Moreover, the mobility levels of individuals tend to be higher for mothers than for fathers, which implies a greater improvement when compared to the most vulnerable group, i.e., women. No very significant differences have been found in the levels of mobility between baron sons and women.

This study examines the social-cultural challenges of upward track mobility from vocational to academic tracking at the transition to upper secondary education in Germany. Within the highly stratified German education system, these challenges include habitual alienation from the family and milieu of origin. Using a Bourdieusian framework and data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we examine the effect of these challenges on the choices for academic upper secondary education by addressing ambivalent parental expectations regarding social upward mobility and habitual loyalty to the family. The study explores how an immigrant origin and older siblings shape perceptions of these expectations and associated challenges, and thus influence the educational choices at the transition to upper secondary education.Linear probability models (N 2866) show that ambivalent parental expectations hinder the choice for academic upper secondary education. This effect was stronger for nonimmigrant students. Older siblings reduce this negative influence for both immigrant and non-immigrant students. We extend previous literature on educational choices of immigrant and non-immigrant youth by highlighting that ambivalent parental expectations may be a barrier to upward track mobility, moderated by older siblings.

In the present research we examine, first, the extent to which the Israeli public endorse wage-gaps between immigrants and comparable non-immigrant workers (employed in identical low-wage jobs), and second, whether the endorsement of wage discrimination against immigrants is associated with immigrants’ characteristics. Data for the analysis were obtained from a representative sample of the Jewish population in Israel (N = 600). We implemented a multifactorial survey experiment design including immigrants’ characteristics such as continent of origin, education, religion, and reason for migration. The experimental setup contained 252 vignettes. Vignette decks were randomly assigned to the respondents for evaluation of the fairness of the wage-gaps between immigrants and comparable non-immigrant workers. Analysis of the data leads to a twofold conclusion. First, justification of wage discrimination against immigrants is widespread. Second, justification of wage discrimination is influenced by immigrants’ characteristics, being most pronounced (even extreme) in the case of clearly defined “outgroup” populations (Muslims and Christians, asylum seekers and labor migrants) and least pronounced in the case of immigrants belonging to the dominant “in-group” population (Jews and repatriates). In addition, endorsement of discrimination tends to increase with respondents’ levels of prejudice, fear of cultural change, and economic threat. The findings and their meaning are discussed in light of theories on economic discrimination.