Research in Social Stratification and Mobility最新文献

Estimates of intergenerational economic mobility for a recent U.S. birth cohort published by Opportunity Insights reveal a striking empirical puzzle: while there is a substantial gap in the upward mobility outcomes achieved by low-income Black and White males there is no such racial mobility gap for females. This study examines municipal police force size as a potential driver of these disparate mobility patterns. Although a larger police force may enhance mobility outcomes for all low-income children through reducing exposure to crime, for Black males prior work suggests this will be offset by the disparate negative impact of increased contact with the criminal justice system. Analyzing a sample of 200 major U.S. cities, linear models find a positive association between the number of police officers per capita and the size of the racial mobility gap for males, but not for females. We go on to show more police personnel in the late 1990s is associated with an increased gap in the likelihood of incarceration for Black males relative to White males. Taken together, our findings point to the heterogeneous impacts of policing for different race-sex groups as one potential explanation for why we observe a racial mobility gap between Black and White males and why this gap is larger in some cities and smaller in others.

Labor unions play a key role in the defense of workers’ rights and in the construction of more egalitarian societies. Despite this, few empirical investigations have analyzed how attitudes toward labor unions are shaped by subjective manifestations of inequality. Bringing together the sociological and social-psychological research on inequality, in this article we do so by studying how attitudes towards unions are shaped by class identification and by ideal inequality, understood as the level of inequality that people consider ideal or fair. Using data from the 2020 Latinobarómetro survey for 18 Latin American countries, we find that pro-union attitudes are significantly higher among those who identify with the lower-middle class but not among those who identify with the lower class. We also find a negative relationship between ideal inequality, measured by a pseudo-Gini index of ideal inequality, and pro-union attitudes: those who want less economic inequality have more positive attitudes towards unions. Finally, we find that the effect of class identification and ideal inequality is moderated by individual political orientations. At the end of this article, we explain these findings and show how they contribute to the recent research on subjective inequality and attitudes toward labor unions.

The labor market exhibits persistent occupational segregation by gender, with women and men performing distinct job tasks within their occupations. Prior research suggests that non-routine job tasks generally lead to higher wages, especially in digitally advancing contexts. However, these findings are largely based on cross-sectional data and neglect gender as a relevant dimension of inequality. We analyze three-wave panel data over nine years from the German National Educational Panel Study to explore the relationship between changes in non-routine job tasks and wages by gender. Given the constrained wage-setting opportunities within German firms, we further examine whether the association between task changes and wages differs for employees with and without job changes, both within and across occupational segments. Our fixed-effect regression analyses reveal gender-specific associations between changes in non-routine job tasks and wage increases. Men benefit from performing more complex and autonomous tasks, with additional gains when an inter-segmental job change accompanies the increase in complex job tasks. Conversely, women do not see wage benefits from enhancements in either complex or autonomous job tasks. These findings underscore the gendered patterns of wage increases associated with advancements in non-routine job tasks, with men profiting intra-individually from shifts towards more non-routine job tasks.

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.