Age, period, and cohort effects on religious activities and beliefs

Despite the theoretical emphasis on religious decline in modern societies, sociologists remain divided over trends in religious activity and belief that support or refute claims of religious decline. Much of this disagreement stems from the inability to distinguish between period and cohort effects when analyzing repeated cross-sectional survey data. I use the intrinsic estimator, a recently developed method of simultaneously estimating age, period, and cohort effects, to examine changes in Americans’ religious service attendance, prayer, belief in the afterlife, and biblical literalism. Results show that regular service attendance declines, predominantly across cohorts. There are also period- and cohort-based declines in biblical literalism and a cohort-based decline in prayer. Belief in the afterlife is relatively stable across periods and cohorts. These results provide mixed support for theories of religious decline, and they demonstrate the importance of differentiating between period and cohort effects on social change.     

The motherhood wage penalty: A meta-analysis

Mothers tend to receive lower wages than comparable childless women. This ‘motherhood wage gap’ has been reported in numerous studies. We summarize the existing empirical evidence on this topic using meta-analysis and test for several mechanisms which can be responsible for the persistence of the wage gap. Based on 208 wage effects of having exactly one child and 245 wage effects of the total number of children, we find an average motherhood wage gap of around 3.6–3.8%. While the gaps associated with the total number of children are mostly explained by the loss of mothers' human capital during child-related career breaks, the gaps associated with one child are predominantly driven by mothers' choice of jobs and occupations that pay less. The residual gap is smallest in Nordic countries, where public policies actively support gender equality and reconciliation of work and family, as well as Belgium and France, and largest in the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries.     

He said, she said: The gender wage gap according to self and proxy reports in the Current Population Survey

Roughly half the labor force data in the Current Population Survey (CPS) are provided by proxy respondents, and since 1979, men’s reliance on proxies has dropped dramatically while women’s reliance on proxies has increased. Few authors, however, have examined how combining these first-hand and second-hand reports may influence our understanding of long-term economic trends. We exploit the outgoing rotation group structure of the CPS by matching individual records one year apart, and we find that self-reported wages are higher than proxy-reported wages even after controlling for all time invariant characteristics. Furthermore, we find that changes in the use of proxy respondents by men and women since 1979 have made current estimates of the gender wage gap larger than they would have been without changes in reporting status. This suggests that the gender wage gap has closed more than previously estimated. We recommend that researchers combine self and proxy responses with great care, especially when analyzing time trends or making gender comparisons.     

Gender differences in the impact of job mobility on earnings: The role of occupational segregation

In recent years, researchers have begun to explore the extent to which the impact of switching firms (inter-firm mobility) on wages varies between men and women. Using data from the NLSY79 from 1979 to 2012, this paper extends existing research by exploring how occupational segregation and individual level factors contribute to gender differences in the impact of voluntary inter-firm mobility on wages. The paper also examines how patterns vary depending on education level. Findings suggest that men without a college education receive greater wage gains from voluntary inter-firm mobility than similarly educated women although there is no overall gender difference for individuals with a bachelor's degree. The wage returns to voluntary inter-firm mobility for both men and women increase as a function of the male representation in the occupation. For individuals without a college education, the male premium to voluntary inter-firm mobility is largest in highly male dominated occupations. However, women with a bachelor's degree employed in highly male dominated occupations use voluntary inter-firm mobility to narrow the gender wage gap.     

Exploring the spatial wage penalty for women: Does it matter where you live?

Inequality between men and women has decreased over the past four decades in the US, but wage inequality among groups of women has increased. As metropolitan women’s earnings grew by 25% over the past four decades, nonmetropolitan women’s earnings only grew by 15%. In the current study we draw on data from the Current Population Survey to analyze the spatial wage gap among women. We explore differences in the spatial wage gap by education, occupation, and industry. Regression models that control for marriage, motherhood, race, education, region, age, and work hours indicate that metropolitan women earn 17% more per hour than nonmetropolitan women. Nonmetropolitan women earn less than metropolitan women who live in central cities and outside central cities. The gap in metropolitan-nonmetropolitan wages is higher for more educated women than for less educated women. The wage gap is only 5% for women without a high school degree, but it is 15% for women with a college degree and 26% for women with an advanced degree. Nonmetropolitan college graduates are overrepresented in lower-paying occupations and industries. Metropolitan college graduates, however, are overrepresented in higher-paying occupations and industries, such as professional services and finance.     

Declining inter-industry wage dispersion in the US

Industrial effects have long been significant factors in wage inequality. Previous research indicates that wage differentials across industries were increasing through the mid 1980s. Using more recent data, however, we find that the level of inter-industry wage dispersion declined by 36% from 1986 to 2002 despite the continued trend towards increasing inequality in the labor force. This decline in inter-industry wage dispersion is evident across gender and educational groups. Using multilevel growth curve models, our multivariate results indicate that the decline is only weakly related to industrial changes in education, occupation or even productivity despite the fact that the latter variable had been a critical factor in the prior period. Indicators of globalization and downsizing also do not appear to explain this decline. For the more recent period, the most important factors associated with the narrowing of inter-industry wage dispersion are reduced unionization rates and the higher proportion of casual workers. We interpret these results as suggesting that firms may now be less economically obliged to pass on a portion of their rents to broad groups of workers and may instead be engaged in more idiosyncratic processes of negotiation with individual workers based on micro-level sources of bargaining power.     

Unemployment scarring by gender: Human capital depreciation or stigmatization? Longitudinal evidence from the Netherlands, 1980–2000

Using longitudinal data from the Dutch Labor Force Supply Panel (OSA), this article examines how unemployment scarring (i.e., wage setbacks following unemployment) and its underlying mechanisms operate across gender in the Netherlands over the period 1985–2000. A series of fixed effect panel models that correct for unobserved heterogeneity, reveal a notable disparity in unemployment scarring by gender. Interestingly, while unemployment scarring is short-lived and partly conditional upon human capital differences among women, it is strongly persistent among men and contingent upon old age, ethnicity, and tight economic conditions. Our findings provide new evidence regarding unemployment scarring by gender while they support the hypothesis that among women the effects of unemployment scarring are predominantly driven by human capital depreciation, while among men stigma effects dominate.     

Are white evangelical Protestants lower class? A partial test of church-sect theory

Testing hypotheses derived from church-sect theory and contemporary research about changes in evangelical Protestants’ social status, I use repeated cross-sectional survey data spanning almost four decades to examine changes in the social-class hierarchy of American religious traditions. While there is little change in the social-class position of white evangelical Protestants from the early 1970s to 2010, there is considerable change across birth cohorts. Results from hierarchical age–period–cohort models show: (1) robust, across-cohort declines in social-class differences between white evangelical Protestants and liberal Protestants, affiliates of “other” religions, and the unaffiliated, (2) stability in social-class differences between white evangelical Protestants and moderate, Pentecostal, and nondenominational Protestants, (3) moderate across-cohort growth in social-class differences between white evangelical Protestants and Catholics, and (4) these patterns vary across indicators of social class. The findings in this article provide partial support for church-sect theory as well as other theories of social change that emphasize the pivotal role of generations.     

Uneven transitions: Period- and cohort-related changes in gender attitudes in China, 1995-2007

This paper analyzes temporal variations in two gender attitudes in China: beliefs about gender equality and perspectives on women’s combined work and family roles. It uses the most currently available population series from the 1995, 2001 and 2007 World Value Surveys of 4500 respondents and a series of multilevel cross-classified models to properly estimate period and cohort effects. Attitudes toward women’s dual roles manifest neither period nor cohort effects; the population displays a universal high level of acceptance of women’s paid employment. Orientations toward gender equality manifest both cohort and period effects: members of the youngest cohort of both sexes hold the most liberal attitudes; the positive effect of college education has increased over time. Attitude toward gender equality in China displays neither a shift toward conservatism nor an over-time trend toward egalitarianism in 1995-2007, a time of rapid economic growth.     

Network effects across the earnings distribution: Payoffs to visible and invisible job finding assistance

This study makes three critical contributions to the “Do Contacts Matter?” debate. First, the widely reported null relationship between informal job searching and wages is shown to be mostly the artifact of a coding error and sample selection restrictions. Second, previous analyses examined only active informal job searching without fully considering the benefits derived from unsolicited network assistance (the “invisible hand of social capital”) – thereby underestimating the network effect. Third, wage returns to networks are examined across the earnings distribution. Longitudinal data from the NLSY reveal significant wage returns for network-based job finding over formal job searching, especially for individuals who were informally recruited into their jobs (non-searchers). Fixed effects quantile regression analyses show that contacts generate wage premiums among middle and high wage jobs, but not low wage jobs. These findings challenge conventional wisdom on contact effects and advance understanding of how social networks affect wage attainment and inequality.     

Separating age,period, and cohort effects in white U.S. fertility, 1920–1970

Four models are developed to describe the odds transformation of period- and age-specific fertility rates as products of age, period, and cohort effects. These are applied to data for white U.S. women age 15–44 from 1920 to 1970, with equal weights given to each rate. All models which include age fit subsets of the data extremely well. Per effect, the incorporation of periods improves the fit much more than the incorporation of cohorts. It is shown that first differences are invariant in two-effect models, and second differences are invariant in the three-effect models.     

Changing perceived importance of religion in mainland China, 1990–2012: An age-period- cohort analysis

The comprehensive social reform and relaxation of religious regulation in mainland China have encouraged scholars to propose a revival thesis of religion, predicting a rising prevalence of religious adherence in the Reform Era. This study extends the revival thesis by focusing attention on people's subjective religiosity, and investigates age, period, and cohort effects on the transition in perceived importance of religion from 1990 to 2012. Capitalizing on the repeated cross-sectional data of the China sample in the World Values Survey, this study shows that (1) The senior population, relative to the younger counterpart, attaches greater importance to religion. (2) The net period effect suggests that Chinese citizens' perceived importance of religion follows an upward trend by the early 2000s, but no significant growth is detected henceforward. (3) The cohorts who experienced the anti-religion Mao's Era in their adolescent life course stage have an evidently lower probability of viewing religion to be important, in relation to the cohorts of the Reform Era. Theoretical implications of the empirical age-period-cohort patterns for the religious economies theory and change of Chinese religious landscape are discussed.     

The role of occupational attributes in gender earnings inequality, 1970–2010

Grounded in the research on the important role of social structures in forming gender inequalities, this study examines the effect of occupational attributes on the gender earnings gap over four decades. Using the IPUMS-USA from 1970 to 2010, the paper shows that occupational attributes cannot be reduced to the aggregate attributes of their individual incumbents. Rather, the effect of occupations on the gender earnings gap goes far beyond both the distributive role of occupational segregation and the effect of individual wage-related characteristics. Furthermore, occupations not only explain a significant portion of net gender pay gaps, but have also contributed to the narrowing of the gaps over the past several decades, as occupational attributes that favor women's pay have become more dominant over time.     

Women's employment trajectories during early adulthood in urban China: A cohort comparison

This study uses retrospective work history data from CGSS 2008 and employs group-based trajectory analysis to model the diverse employment trajectories of cohorts of urban Chinese women (born in the 1940s–1970s) during young adulthood (age 20–35). We identify ideal-types of urban women's employment trajectories and explore traits associated with each group type. In particular, we examine whether and how the timing of marriage and fertility as well as socioeconomic background help to distinguish patterns of women's labor force attachment in young adulthood. We also examine how these patterns change across cohorts given China's rapid social transformations in the past few decades. We find that delaying family formation is generally associated with more consistent work attachment, but this relationship is also largely associated with one's socioeconomic background. Our results reveal significant cohort variations in the shape of women's employment trajectories and we discuss how institutional and cultural contexts of different historical periods could have shaped family formation and employment processes differently. Our findings highlight the heterogeneity of urban women's work and family formation patterns in the context of rising gender inequalities and rapid socioeconomic transformation over time.     

Gender inequality in earnings in industrialized East Asia

Using data from the 2006 Family Module of the East Asian Social Survey, we use regression-based methods to decompose the sex gap in hourly wages in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. We find that Taiwan has the smallest sex gap in wages, and is also distinctive in that employed women have more education than men, on average. Japan is distinctive in the high proportion of women consigned to non-regular (temporary, often part-time) jobs, and this factor explains much more of the gap in Japan than elsewhere. Korea is distinctive in having an extremely high proportion of men who are college graduates; therefore, in Korea gender differences in education and occupational placement explain more of the gap than elsewhere. Despite many historical similarities between these societies, our analysis points out the heterogeneity within industrialized East Asia when it comes to gender inequality.     

Selective Emigration, Cohort Quality, and Models of Immigrant Assimilation

In this article we identify sample underenumeration, changing cohort quality, and selective emigration as problems that threaten the validity of findings on immigrant socioeconomic assimilation derived from cross-sectional data. Using information on Mexican immigrants from the 1990 U.S. census and a unique binational source of data, we address the effects of these problems on cross-sectional regressions of English proficiency and wage attainment. Our results suggest that the underenumeration of temporary and undocumented migrants biases the estimated effects of human capital variables downward, but that selective emigration does not significantly affect cross-sectional models. We do find, however, that period of entry is a poor proxy for total migrant experience, and when we disentangle duration and cohort effects, we find some evidence for shifts in cohort quality over time, but not the systematic decline seen by others.     

我国养老保险资金缺口的影响因素分析简

从微观角度对未来养老保险资金缺口进行测算,结果表明,工资增长率与个人养老保险积累基金投资收益率的相对差异大小、退休年龄和个人帐户缴费率等均对养老金缺口产生影响,而工资增长率与个人养老保险积累基金投资收益率的相对差异大小影响更明显。未来我国人口年龄结构及养老金缴费来源存在压力的情况下,提高养老保险资金的投资收益率是缓解我国养老保险资金缺口压力的根本路径。     

Bringing the Firms into Globalization Research: The Effects of Foreign Investment and Exports on Wages in Mexican Manufacturing Firms

Researchers specializing in organizations and labor markets have paid insufficient attention to the effects that foreign ownership of a firm and its orientation towards export production may have on the wages it pays to its workers. Using information from a nationally-representative sample of manufacturing firms in Mexico, a paradigmatic case of a developing country that is highly integrated into world markets, we find that foreign-owned and export-oriented firms pay considerably more than nationally-owned firms engaged in the production of goods for sale in the domestic market. Second, beyond paying higher wages to their workers, foreign-owned firms also raise the wages paid by domestic firms operating in the same regional labor markets. The wage premium in foreign and export-oriented firms cannot be explained by their size, industry, geographical location, productivity, use of advanced technology, or the sociodemographic composition of their workforce. We find evidence that wages in foreign-owned companies in Mexico are dependent on the country of origin of the capital investment. A greater difference between the industry-specific wages paid in the country of ownership and Mexico is associated with a higher wage premium in Mexican affiliates. Future work should strive to link information from foreign-owned affiliates with their parent companies abroad.     

The role of parenthood in shaping the gender wage gap – A comparative analysis of 26 European countries

We use cross-national data on 26 EU countries to estimate how parenthood contributes to the gender wage gap, and assess how institutional elements affect this relationship. We find that irrespective of cultural norms and policies, fathers receive a wage premium, which increases the gender gap. Motherhood gaps vary across countries. The highest gaps are seen in Eastern European countries, where policies and norms lead to long absences from work. Moderate to small penalties are found in Continental Europe, Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries, alongside higher maternal employment. No motherhood penalties are found for Southern EU countries, where mothers return to work quickly or exit the labor market indefinitely.     

中国农民工工资走势:1979—2010

在有关中国农民工工资的文献中,农民工工资长期走势的研究仍付之阙如。在系统收集、梳理有关数据资料的基础上,对改革开放时期中国农民工工资水平及其演变轨迹的定量估测表明:过去30余年,其名义货币工资以年均近10%的速度增长;经用消费者价格指数调整的实际工资经历了三个阶段的演变;农民工与正式职工工资的比率呈先高后低走势。