Socioeconomic background and racial earnings inequality: A propensity score analysis

Does a racial earnings gap exist among individuals who come from similar childhood socioeconomic backgrounds? Is the racial earnings gap larger or smaller for those from higher or lower socioeconomic origins? This research addresses these questions by taking a counterfactual approach to estimating the residual racial pay gap between non-Hispanic black and white men from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The findings indicate that the racial earnings gap is larger among those from lower-middle class and working class childhood backgrounds than among those from upper-middle class backgrounds, for whom the racial pay gap is indistinguishable from zero. Compared to their more advantaged counterparts, black men from lower-middle and working class backgrounds have more difficulty rising above their socioeconomic origins relative to white men from similar social class backgrounds. Racial earnings equality among those from upper-middle class backgrounds suggests that the high levels of racial inequality often observed among those with college and professional degrees may in fact reflect heterogeneous childhood socioeconomic backgrounds among the college educated—backgrounds that continue to have an effect on earnings despite individual academic achievements.     

Non-intact families and diverging educational destinies: A decomposition analysis for Germany,Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States

We examine whether the presence of non-intact families in society is related to increased inequality in educational attainment according to social background, as suggested by the ‘diverging destinies’ thesis. We analyze four countries, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that differ in the prevalence of non-intact families and in the strength of the negative association between growing up in a non-intact family and children's educational attainment. We use a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition approach to calculate a ‘counterfactual’ estimate of differences in educational attainment between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged children in the hypothetical absence of non-intact families. Contrary to the diverging destinies thesis, we find little differences between actual and ‘counterfactual’ levels of inequality in educational attainment in all four countries. Whereas growing-up in a non-intact family affects the individual chances of educational attainment, the overall contribution of non-intact families to aggregate levels of social background inequality appears minimal.     

Work–family conflict in context: The impact of structural and perceived neighborhood disadvantage on work–family conflict

Despite increasing levels of work–family conflict (WFC) among North Americans, few scholars examine the broader contexts in which these conflicts occur. I address this gap by examining how the neighborhood of residence impacts WFC, with a focus on social inequality and disadvantage across neighborhoods. I hypothesize that neighborhood disadvantage may impact WFC directly—by introducing ambient stressors that inhibit individuals from successfully balancing competing domain demands, and indirectly—by undermining the psychological resources that would combat the harmful effects of disadvantaged contexts. Using individual and census-level data from Canada, I consider both objective and subjective measures of neighborhood disadvantage and find that, overall, individuals in more disadvantaged neighborhoods are worse off because these contexts increase WFC, while reducing the psychological resources that would otherwise buffer these deleterious effects. However, some of these associations vary by gender. I discuss the broader implications of these findings for neighborhood effects and WFC research.     

Political democracy,economic liberalization,and macro-sociological models of intergenerational mobility

Building on the previously investigated macro-sociological models which analyze the consequences of economic development, income inequality, and international migration on social mobility, this article studies the specific contextual covariates of intergenerational reproduction of occupational status in post-communist societies. It is theorized that social mobility is higher in societies with democratic political regimes and less liberalized economies. The outlined hypotheses are tested by using micro- and macro-level datasets for 21 post-communist societies which are fitted into multilevel mixed-effects linear regressions. The derived findings suggest that factors specific to transition societies, conventional macro-level variables, and the legacy of the Soviet Union explain variation in intergenerational social mobility, but the results vary depending which birth cohorts survey participants belong to and whether or not they stem from advantaged or disadvantaged social origins. These findings are robust to various alternative data, sample, and method specifications.     

公共权力与公共福利保障——兼论社会弱势群体的福利诉求与保障

本文从公共选择理论和新制度经济学视角出发,以公共权力自利性膨胀倾向与公共福利保障之间的悖论为核心,指出了公共权力的双重属性对公共福利产生三种作用:促进、阻碍以及促进和阻碍的混合状态;探析了社会个体福利诉求何以整合为公共福利,并指出公共福利诉求不能仅仅为社会强势集团所垄断,应从社会整体繁荣中普遍关注社会弱势群体福利;作为公共权力机构的政府应在平衡社会强势群体与弱势群体福利诉求的基础上,最大限度地保障社会弱势群体的基本福利。     

Reward interventions: A strategy to Erode social inequality?

Decades of research illuminates how status beliefs about socially significant characteristics, like gender, fundamentally alter expectations about individual's competence and worth. This process biases opportunity structures and resource distributions, thereby recreating social inequalities in a self-fulfilling fashion. Many social and organizational policies attempt to reduce inequality by increasing disadvantaged groups' access to valued rewards, such as prestigious alma maters, awards, and valued positions. In addition to meaningfully increasing resources, the status these rewards convey should also theoretically increase the status of the particular people who come to possess them. To know whether inversions to reward structures reduce social inequality, however, we must first demonstrate that the status value of rewards alone is an effective intervention. In an experimental test of interventions to gender status inequality, reward markers with relatively higher or lower status value were consistently or inconsistently associated with the gender of the participants' task partners. Results indicate that rewards intervened in the groups' gendered status hierarchy as participants were more likely to be influenced by their partners' rewards than their gender.     

SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS ON HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION

Research into the effects of neighborhood characteristics on children’s behavior has burgeoned in recent years, but these studies have generally adopted a limited conceptualization of the spatial and temporal dimensions of neighborhood effects. We use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and techniques of spatial data analysis to examine how both the socioeconomic characteristics of extralocal neighborhoods—neighborhoods surrounding the immediate neighborhood of residence—and the duration of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods throughout the childhood life course influence the likelihood of graduating from high school. Among blacks and whites, socioeconomic advantage in the immediate neighborhood increases the likelihood of completing high school, but among whites higher levels of socioeconomic advantage in extralocal neighborhoods decrease high school graduation rates. Extralocal neighborhood advantage suppresses the influence of advantage in the immediate neighborhood so that controlling for extralocal conditions provides stronger support for the neighborhood effects hypothesis than has previously been observed. Exposure to advantaged neighborhoods over the childhood life course exerts a stronger effect than point-in-time measures on high school graduation, and racial differences in exposure to advantaged neighbors over the childhood life course help to suppress a net black advantage in the likelihood of completing high school.     

Sexual inequality in the workplace: An employer-specific analysis of pay differences

This paper reports an analysis of employer-specific sex differences in the processes governing the salary attainment of personnel of a large company. The two dominant theories of inequality both view discrimination as the operative cause of pay differences, but locate the structural source of discrimination at different points in the employer-employee exchange space. The wage discrimination hypothesis asserts that the economic disadvantage of women issues directly from the pay practices of employers, with women receiving “unequal pay for equal work.” The crowding, or employment segregation, hypothesis asserts that inequality issues from the employment practices of employers; disparities in the allocation of jobs and promotions results in segregation along sexual lines, with women relegated to lower-paying positions. The findings show that both wage discrimination and sexual segregation of the company's job and rank structures contribute to inequality, but that the latter is more important. The implications for the issue of discrimination are briefly discussed.     

Disaggregating the effect on profits in manufacturing industries of having imperfectly competitive consumers and suppliers

Casting the American economy as a network of economic exchange relations between firms in sectors, industries are those sectors engaged in manufacturing and are here analyzed as network positions. The structure of an industry's dollar transactions with suppliers is demonstrated to affect industry profits in a manner distinct from that in which its structure of transactions with consumers affects profits. For the 335 four-digit SIC manufacturing industries corresponding to unique sectors of the 1967 Input-Output Study, price-cost margins corrected for interindustry differences in capital requirements are regressed over four-firm concentration ratios and various structural indicators of imperfect competition among suppliers versus consumers. The structural indicators are computed from dollar flow coefficients among 492 sectors of the 1967 Input-Output Study. Only one type of product flows from an industry to its consumers, who have no trouble seeing the value of collusion despite the multiple sectors in which their own products are sold; however, products from different sectors may flow to the industry without creating the competition among suppliers that prompts collusion. Industry profits are constrained by suppliers to the extent that firms in the industry purchase supplies from few separate sectors as product markets. In contrast, industry profits are constrained by consumers to the extent that firms in the industry sell to a small number of oligopolistic sectors.     

Migration and metropolitan opportunity structures: A demographic response to racial inequality

This paper examines the impact of racial inequality on black and white migration rates for a sample of metropolitan areas in the United States 1975–1980. A conceptual framework for migration that includes a measure of racial inequality is developed and evaluated. The results indicate that blacks are attracted to areas with lower levels of inequality, but contrary to our expectations, the rate of black out-migration is lower in Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas with higher levels of racial inequality. In addition, whites seem to be attracted to labor markets where whites have the greatest advantage as measured by occupational inequality, and they are more likely to leave areas where the competition with blacks for jobs is greater. Implications for theory and further research for the comparative study of black and white migration are outlined.     

中国三大区域间收入不平等影响因素的实证研究:1952-2008

区域收入不平等的持续增大,对个人与群体的尊严、国家经济的可持续性发展形成严峻挑战。以往研究局限于经济学视角,只关心某一或某几种因素对收入不平等影响,过于碎片化。本文利用1952-2008年国家统计数据,基于结构主义视角,通过随机效应模型考察了区域间收入不平等背后的因果机制。研究发现:经济增长与区域间收入不平等存在微弱倒"U"关系;结构因素是构筑区域收入不平等的主要力量,解释比例达到69.7%。本文认为,"非均衡发展"是中国经济转型与发展过程中必然的路径选择,区域收入不平等不可避免,并将长期存在。     

Global biodiversity decline of marine and freshwater fish: A cross-national analysis of economic, demographic, and ecological influences

We test competing hypotheses from political–economic and neo-liberal theories about the effects of economic growth and urbanization on a neglected, but important, indicator of environmental health: aquatic biodiversity. We analyze cross-national data on the number of threatened fish species within national territorial waters using negative binomial regression. We find that, counter to the expectations of neo-liberal theories, economic growth increases the likelihood of fish species becoming threatened within nations. Urbanization, however, appears to have no additional effect. The “environmental Kuznets curve” does not hold for aquatic biodiversity, suggesting that further economic growth in nations is likely to escalate the biodiversity crisis.     

Welfare myths: The transmission of values and work among TANF families

Both “welfare culture” arguments and structural explanations of poverty suggest that attitudes may have an effect on work and welfare outcomes. However, most scholars only examine objective behaviors and characteristics despite the fact that values are an underlying mechanism in explanations of the transmission of welfare and work behavior. Using data from a survey of recent welfare recipients in Louisiana and structural equation methods, we analyze causal relationships among family background, socioeconomic characteristics, attitudes, and two outcomes—TANF participation and employment. We find some support for the intergenerational transmission of welfare but not through values; we find no evidence that under the TANF system, values inhibit work.     

Did send-down experience benefit youth? A reevaluation of the social consequences of forced urban–rural migration during China’s Cultural Revolution

During China’s Cultural Revolution, a large proportion of urban youth were forced to go to the countryside as a result of the state’s “send-down” policy. Past research has been ambivalent about the long-term social consequences for the Chinese youth who experienced send-down. Some scholars have suggested that the send-down experience may have yielded beneficial effects. To test this claim, we analyze data from the Survey of Family Life in Urban China, which we conducted in three large cities in 1999. Questions available in this data set allow us to ascertain the send-down experience of both the respondent and a sibling and educational attainment at the times of send-down and return. Our analyses of the new data show that the send-down experience does not seem to have benefited the affected Chinese youth. Differences in social outcomes between those who experienced send-down and those who did not are either non-existent or spurious due to other social processes.     

On a dynamic response model of W. F. Kempf

Kempf's model was used by W. F. Kempf and P. Hampapa (1977, “Conditional inference for the dynamic test model,” in Mathematical Models for Social Psychology (W. F. Kempf and B. H. Repp, Eds.), Chap. 3, pp. 81–100, Wiley, New York) to analyze the cross-classification of responses to four items on sex typing of children's household chores from the 1971 Detroit Area Study. The model alters the simple Rasch measurement model for dichotomous items to include transfer effects, so that responses are allowed to be serially dependent (G. Rasch, 1966, “An individualistic approach to item analysis,” in Readings in Mathematical Social Science (P. F. Lazarsfeld and N. W. Henry, Eds.), pp. 89–107, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1980; Probabilistic Models for Some Intelligence and Attainment Tests, expanded ed., Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago). Although Kempf and Hampapa did not find strong reason to reject the dynamic model, the present analysis indicates that it should be rejected in favor of a two-dimensional Rasch model.     

政治合法性问题的系统分析

合法性是现代政治分析的一个关键术语。尽管理论界已从不同角度对政治合法性问题做了卓有成效的研究,但也存在诸多理论分歧。作为整体的政治合法性问题实际上是由各类政治主体为赢得政治客体的合法性支持,围绕政治合法性基础的构建、维持与维护而在一定的社会生态环境中,相互联系、相互作用,构成的一个复杂的体系,因而单维构建的合法性是不存在的。从系统论的观点看,这个体系构成了系统。     

中国基础教育领域中的机会不平等及其变化

把握教育不平等的变化方式与变化条件是推进教育公平不可或缺的研究工作。因能力分化和结构授予所导致的机会不平等具有不同的变化机制,而家庭资源因其禀赋差异对两类不平等的影响各有侧重,为此,家庭资源可区分为内生性与外依性两种类型。基于第三、四、五次中国人口普查数据,就1976年至2000年间中国基础教育领域中的机会不平等及其变化进行的实证检验表明,内生性家庭资源因其较少受外部社会条件和社会过程的干预,它们导致的教育不平等将是持久而稳定地增长的;而外依性家庭资源对机会不平等的影响则可能因教育扩展或其他大规模的平等化社会过程而下降,也可能在相反的社会条件下被强化。     

The Selection Theory of Persisting Party Advantages in Russia: More Evidence and Implications

Rona-Tas and Guseva (2001) present four criticisms of the “selection theory” explaining why former Communist Party members do better in post-Soviet Russia. None of their criticisms constitute definitive evidence against the selection theory. However, they raise reasonable doubts regarding the timing of the survey and the specification of the model used to empirically confirm the theory in my original article (Gerber, 2000a). These doubts are laid to rest based on a range of empirical evidence, including a new analysis of survey data collected in 2000. The selection theory remains the most compelling and empirically substantiated explanation of the success of former Communist Party members in post-Soviet Russia. The theory points to previously overlooked similarities in stratification processes in state socialist and capitalist societies.     

Competing for jobs: Labor queues and gender sorting in the hiring process

While much research has documented the pattern and extent of sex segregation of workers once they are employed, few studies have addressed the pre-hire mechanisms that are posited to produce sex segregation in employment. While the notion of a labor queue—the rank order of the set of people that employers choose among—plays a prominent role in pre-hire accounts of job sex sorting mechanisms, few studies have examined the ways in which job candidates are sorted into labor queues. In this paper, we explore the mechanisms by which labor queues contribute to the gendering of jobs by studying the hiring process for all jobs at a call center. Being placed in a queue has a clear gendering effect on the hiring process: the sex distribution of applicants who are matched to queues and those who are rejected at this phase diverge, and among those assigned to queues, women are prevalent in queues for low pay, low status jobs. The screening process also contributes to the gendering of the population of hires at this firm. Females are more prevalent among hires than they are among candidates at initial queue assignment. Among high status jobs, however, males are more prevalent than females. Moreover, there are important wage implications associated with matching to queues. While there are large between-queue sex differences in the paid wages associated with allocation to queues, once allocated to queues the wage differences between male and female candidates are nil. Consequently, the roots of gender wage inequality in this setting lie in the initial sorting of candidates to labor queues.     

Economic deprivation and racial segregation: Comparing Superfund sites in Portland, Oregon and Detroit, Michigan

The research presented here weighs the ability of two major explanations of social inequality—Massey and Denton’s racial segregation explanation and Wilson’s emphasis on economic deprivation (concentrated poverty)—to predict environmental inequality. Two sets of logistic regression analyses are used to predict the location of Superfund sites in Portland, Oregon and Detroit, Michigan providing a conditional understanding of environmental inequality within a larger sociological context. The analysis includes a general examination of the two theories in all census tracts in both cities and a set of analyses focusing upon Black neighborhoods in Detroit. The findings indicate that there is support for explanations of environmental inequality that include both racial segregation and economic deprivation, but that the more powerful of the two is economic deprivation. The results suggest that even though African-American neighborhoods disproportionately house Superfund sites, these facilities are more likely to be located in Black neighborhoods that are economically deprived.