Race differences in middle class lifestyle: The role of home ownership

This paper examines race differences in two aspects of “middle class” lifestyle: home ownership and net worth. Home ownership indicates stability; and for older persons net worth is an important part of economic status. Data from the NLS studies of older men are analyzed. The major findings are: (1) while whites at any earnings level are very likely to own homes by ages 50–64, only at relatively high earning levels do blacks begin to approach the home ownership rates of whites; (b) the net worth of blacks is substantially lower than that of whites after adjusting for variables in a standard status attainment model; and (c) however, among home owners the race difference as well as effects of other variables are much smaller than for renters. This is attributed to forced saving through home ownership. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible sources of low home ownership rates and low net worth of blacks and the implication of these findings for the study of middle class status.     

A causal approach to the measurement of job statisfaction

Differences in indicators used to measure job satisfaction raise the question of their comparability. Four commonly used measures of job satisfaction are thus compared with respect to their relationship to three independent variables—education, occupational status, and income (i.e., wages)—in the context of a causal model that incorporates considerations of measurement error in both independent and dependent variables. It is found that in some cases, different indicators imply different conclusions regarding the influence of education and occupational status on job satisfaction. The utility of a causal modeling approach to these problems is also demonstrated.     

Extended-family resources and racial inequality in the transition to homeownership

We use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine how access to financial resources in the extended family affects the accumulation of wealth among non-owners and how these resources subsequently affect transitioning into homeownership. Our findings show that economic conditions of the extended family have substantial effects on non-owners’ wealth accumulation and likelihood of becoming homeowners, even after adjusting for individual sociodemographic and economic characteristics. We find significant effects of extended-family wealth for both black and white households, but effects of extended-family income insufficiency for blacks only. Consequently, limited access to wealth and greater level of poverty in the extended family hamper blacks’ transition to homeownership. Our results show that the level of extended-family wealth necessary for black householders to equalize their likelihood of becoming homeowners with whites is very high. In fact, our findings indicate that white householders embedded in extended families with no net wealth are just as likely to make the transition to ownership as are black householders with affluent extended families. These findings support arguments related to the importance of extended-family resources in processes of residential attainment but also point to important racial differences in not only levels but also consequences of these family resources.     

Sex stratification in the workplace: Male-female differences in economic returns to occupation

Employing data from the 1974–1977 NORC General Social Surveys, I investigate differences in the earnings attainment of currently employed white men and women age 25 to 64. I focus special attention on the explanatory effects of job characteristics other than those traditionally employed in prestige and status-defined earnings models. The results, based on a multivariate regression analysis and a regression standardization procedure, suggest that a nontrivial portion of the earnings gap between men and women is due to women's concentration in jobs which are low-paying and heavily female and because women are less likely than men to exercise authority in their jobs or to control the means of production. Including these factors in an earnings model statistically increases women's earnings as a percentage of men's by over 7%, accounting for approximately 13% of the earnings gap. Net of these job characteristics, gender differences in industry distribution are not substantively important in explaining why women earn less than men, accounting for only 0.4% of the earnings gap. When single women's earnings are adjusted to take account of their occupational concentration, 10% of the male-single female earnings gap is explained, providing preliminary evidence that the job characteristics I specify are not mere proxies for work experience. Including job characteristics as measures of the context of employment thus usefully extends the human capital and prestige or statusdefined models traditionally employed in explanations of the male-female earnings differential.     

Inequality of educational opportunity in France and the United States

Unequality of educational opportunity is related to school structure. Comparison of the attainment process in France and the United States reveals the consequences of structure for individuals' attainments. Turner's (1960) typology of educational systems is applied. The French educational system is shown to be closer to Turner's “sponsorship system,” and that of the U. S. closer to the “contest” type. Inequality of educational opportunity, as indicated by the effect of father's occupational status on years of schooling completed, is greater in France than in the U. S. The difference is accounted for by school structural variables, indicating the importance of structure for inequality of opportunity. Other differences concerning the causes of educational attainment in France and the U. S. are also discussed.     

Educational indicators and occupational achievement

Many sociological and economic studies assume that the variable, Highest Grade Completed in School, is by itself an adequate measure of people's education for the purpose of explaining their occupational achievement. Use of Highest Grade Completed as the sole measure of education has at least two major shortcomings. It assumes people have (1) learned the same amount of (2) the same thing in an academic year. Supplementary education indicators are identified and tested to see if they have a substantial impact on occupational prestige or earnings. Background social statuses and Highest Grade Completed are controlled for in this test. Only measures of subject matter studied in high school or college have a statistically significant relationship with occupational achievement net of Highest Grade Completed and social background variables. Highest Grade Completed is quite adequate in measuring the impact of education on occupational achievement without help from the measures of subject matter studied.     

Some cross-population comparisons of family bias in the effects of schooling on occupational status

It is a truism of research on social stratification that the effects of socioeconomic or family background on educational attainment and adult success lead to biases in the simple regressions of occupational status (or other putative outcomes of schooling) on educational attainment. The present analysis compares findings of family bias in the effects of schooling on occupational status across samples of siblings drawn from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study and from Olneck's sample of brothers from Kalamazoo, Michigan. The comparative analysis shows that family bias in the effect of schooling on occupational status may be much less than is commonly believed and that very large samples may be needed to measure it reliably. Moreover, the analysis suggests that estimates of family bias are very sensitive to the specification of response variability in schooling. The analysis also illustrates some useful methods for cross-population comparison of structural equation models.     

Sex similarities in occupational status attainment: Are the results due to the restriction of the sample to employed women?

Research on sex differences in occupational attainment suggests that working men and working women attain essentially the same mean level of occupational attainment and do so through quite similar processes. A possible explanation for these similarities is that the sample of working women contains an overrepresentation of successful women, since women who can afford not to work will stay out of the labor force unless they find a job commensurate with their education. This we define as a censoring problem. By extending a technique developed by Heckman, we can estimate the structural parameters for all women, regardless of current employment status. This procedure allows us to assess the impact of the censoring problem on women's occupational attainment equations.     

Women's occupational attainment: The effects of work interruptions, self-selection, and unobserved characteristics

This paper addresses specification issues concerning the estimation of women's occupational attainment. Attainment models generally assume independence of error terms across equations, and whether this assumption is made or whether correlation of error terms is assumed is found to have important substantive implications, particularly with respect to education. While education affects first-job status, when first-job status is controlled, education has no significant effect on current attainment. A woman's first-job status appears, then, to be of major importance, and if she enters a job for which she is overqualified, education may not be relied upon to improve her occuppational status in the future. As in the analysis of earnings, it is important not only to include years of experience, as is usual in attainment models, but to include whether a recent work interruption has occurred. This is a significant and important variable in both the correlated and uncorrelated errors models, but the uncorrelated errors model appears to understate the magnitude of effect.     

Dynamic models and attainment in the workplace

The two most marked trends in recent stratification studies are: (1) the shift away from a statical approach to attainment and toward a dynamical representation of achievement, and (2) the shift away from the assumption that achievement is largely a matter of individual characteristics, and toward the view that achievement is the outcome of an employer-employee exchange of productive resources for earnings and status. This paper forges a link between these parallel trends by elaborating on previous formulations of dynamic models of achievement and applying the results to the analysis of earnings attainment in an internal labor market. The modeling section of the paper joins within a single framework the growing interest in ascertaining how a given structure of opportunity shapes achievement and in determining the different points in the career line at which individual background and resource variables impact attainment. Special attention is devoted to the problems facing researchers who wish to bring a dynamic conceptualization of achievement to cross-sectional or otherwise deficient data. Although the empirical application of the various models is largely meant to be illustrative, it is of interest in its own right because it goes substantially beyond previous efforts in this area.     

Effects of family background on social autonomy at midlife

Social autonomy is the tendency to assert one’s opinion in the face of opposition. This paper investigates the social roots of that tendency by focusing on the long-term effects of childhood family background on midlife social autonomy. The effects of two aspects of family background are investigated—socioeconomic background and childhood household composition. Family background variables in these categories have small yet theoretically and statistically significant effects on midlife social autonomy. Parental education and occupation are associated with midlife social autonomy among both men and women. Early-life household composition variables and parental income are associated with social autonomy only among women. Adult status variables generally do not mediate the effects of of the family background variables on midlife social autonomy. This suggests that the long-term effects of family background on social autonomy are primarily due to early life socialization. Gender-specific socialization processes are discussed as explanations for these effects.     

Are there sex differences in the utilization of educational capital among college-educated workers?

This paper introduces the concept of educational utilization as an overlooked part of the education-to-work transition and a potential mechanism by which occupational sex segregation is generated among the college-educated labor force. The paper begins with a critical discussion of the operationalization approaches that have been used in prior research that implicitly measures educational utilization. Multiple empirical measure of the concept are then developed using data from the O*NET and the National Surveys of College Graduates. The explanatory power of each measure is assessed using conditional logit models of occupational attainment. A combined measure is then used to assess sex differences in educational utilization using data from the 1993 and 2003 National Surveys of College Graduates for 2 cohorts of college graduates—those who earned their baccalaureate or post-baccalaureate degrees and entered the labor market in the years 1985–1993 and 1995–2003. The analysis identifies sex differences in educational utilization that vary across field, degree level and cohort and concludes with an examination of the implications of sex differences in educational utilization for occupational segregation.     

The value of educational degrees in turbulent economic times: Evidence from the Youth Development Study

Rising costs of higher education have prompted debate about the value of college degrees. Using mixed effects panel models of data from the Youth Development Study (ages 31–37), we compare occupational outcomes (i.e., weekly hours worked, earnings, employment status, career attainment, and job security) between educational attainment categories within year, and within categories across years, from 2005 to 2011, capturing the period before, during, and in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Our findings demonstrate the long-term value of post-secondary degrees. Bachelor's and Associate's degree recipients, while experiencing setbacks at the height of recession, were significantly better off than those with some or no college attendance. Vocational-Technical degree holders followed a unique trajectory: pre-recession, they are mostly on par with Associate's and Bachelor's recipients, but they are hit particularly hard by the recession and then rebound somewhat afterwards. Our findings highlight the perils of starting but not finishing post-secondary educational programs.     

Inequality in the family: The institutional aspects of women’s earning contribution

This paper examines the effect of employment-supportive policies and arrangements on women’s economic contribution to their family. Using samples of working-age couples in 21 countries we employ multilevel modeling to separate the effects of household and country-level variables on earnings. We distinguish two types of relevant contextual factors: those that support women’s employment while preserving their domestic roles and those that potentially reduce intra-family economic inequalities by allowing women to allocate more of their time to paid employment. The findings suggest that all employment-supportive policies and arrangements increase women’s relative contribution to the household income through their effect on female labor force participation. Among dual-earner families, however, higher rates of childcare facilities increase women’s contribution, while long maternity leave and part-time employment decrease it. These tendencies are more pronounced among mothers.     

Occupational stratification,job-mismatches,and child poverty: Understanding the disadvantage of Black immigrants in the US

This study examines the implications of occupational stratification and job mismatches for the welfare of children, using data from the 2005–2009 American Community Survey. The results show that Black children of immigrants have household heads that are more likely to have occupations with low SEI scores than children in US-born households. More importantly, they demonstrate that intersections between parental job-mismatches and employment in the bottom rather than upper levels of the occupational distribution have important implications for understanding poverty differences among children. Job mismatches within occupations with low SEI scores are associated with greater poverty risks among Black than White, Asian, or Hispanic children of immigrants. However, racial poverty disparities are considerably lower among children with household heads in the highest occupational strata.     

Occupational Gender Segregation and the Earnings Gap: Changes in the 1980s

The 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census data confirm the decline in the earnings gap between men and women. Occupational segregation by gender also declined during the 1980s. Cross-sectional decompositions show that 15% of the earnings gap would be eliminated if women′s occupation distributions were the same as men′s. Over-time decompositions show that declining occupational segregation accounted for about 36% of the decline in the earnings gap; most of the declining earnings gap resulted from more equal pay within occupations.     

Wages, earnings, and occupational status: did World War II veterans receive a premium?

Over 16 million men served during World War II (WWII), and we know that veterans obtained more education and earned higher incomes than did non-veterans and that these premiums were more substantial for Blacks and less educated men. However, we know very little about the reasons for such veteran premiums. Using several distinct, yet connected, theoretical traditions that have been used to link military service to subsequent outcomes—theories of the life course, the status attainment perspective, relatively new conceptualizations of social capital, economic theories of human capital, and theories of selectivity—we seek to redress this lack of understanding. We use survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Mature Men (NLSMM) to examine the long-term effects of military service during WWII on occupational and income attainments. We find that the effects associated with being a veteran of WWII are modest and are mostly limited to less advantaged veterans, and can be largely explained by differences in human capital investment or selectivity. The one finding that cannot be explained by differences in family background, human capital investments, and selectivity is a higher hourly wage rate associated with being a Black veteran.     

Trends in the relative occupational status of African Americans and European immigrants in Northern cities, 1880–1970

In his classic book, A Piece of the Pie, Stanley Lieberson described divergent trends in occupational standing for African Americans and European immigrants after 1920, as the Great Migration from the South swelled the size of the black population in northern cities. In this paper I build upon Lieberson’s work using longitudinal data drawn from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series for the census years 1880–1970. This more versatile data source allows me to examine separate occupational trends for northern-born blacks and southern-born migrants and to control for relevant socio-demographic characteristics. The findings confirm Lieberson’s general conclusion that blacks lost ground, occupationally, to immigrants after 1920. However, they show further that: (1) northern- and southern-born blacks experienced different trends in relative occupational standing after 1920, (2) that these different trends were due largely to compositional differences between the two groups of northern blacks, especially educational differences, and (3) that blacks were generally less successful than immigrants at translating additional educational attainment into improved occupational status, with southern migrants experiencing the weakest occupational returns to education. It is concluded that compositional differences and a racially-defined occupational queue were the most important factors shaping group differences and trends in occupational standing between 1920 and 1970. Timing of arrival in the northern industrial economy and a response by whites to the “racial threat” from a growing black population were less important.     

Globalization, labor market transformation, and metropolitan earnings inequality

Numerous studies have noted the increasing levels of inequality in American society, but relatively few have linked this inequality to the dynamics of the global economy. In this study, we examine the impact of five measures of globalization (global capital, foreign direct investment, exports, foreign born non-citizens, and foreign born citizens) and six measures of labor market transformation (deindustrialization, corporate restructuring, bureaucratic burden, casualization, bad jobs, and multiple job holding) on metropolitan-level earnings inequality of full-time, full-year workers 16 years and older. Our study makes several major contributions to the literature. First, we update and extend the long line of studies on metropolitan earnings inequality. Second, we show that these various dimensions of globalization and labor market transformation exert independent and mainly polarizing effects on the earnings distributions of metropolitan areas, net of controls for labor market structure and sociodemographic variables. Third, we demonstrate the benefits of looking at the causes of inequality in the upper and lower tails of the earnings distribution. Finally, we develop a procedure to estimate counterfactual values of earnings inequality for all major metropolitan areas in the US in 2000. In the process, the paper provides a comprehensive accounting of the impact of globalization and labor market transformation on metropolitan earnings inequality.     

Buffering income loss due to unemployment: Family and welfare state influences on income after job loss in the United States and western Germany

This article analyzes how the family and the welfare state influence household income trajectories after job loss in the United States and in western Germany. Drawing on panel data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), I study the income buffering effects of the family and the welfare state in the short an in the long run after job loss. I demonstrate that household income trajectories after job loss in the two countries are similar for couple households. However, men in the United States rely relatively more on family resources to overcome income loss, whereas German men’s incomes are secured mostly by the welfare state. Women’s unemployment in both countries is mainly buffered by their partners’ higher earnings. Because single households have no access to family support, they face much higher losses in the United States than in Germany. I also show that the more generous German welfare state triggers less private self-help in the form of increased labor force participation on the part of women when their partners lose their jobs. Over time, the family has become more important in buffering incomes after job loss in the United States which smoothed men’s and roughened women’s income trajectories in couple households. In Germany, worsening re-employment chances increased income losses in the long run after job loss.