Social Justice in the Social Work Classroom: Applying a Professional Value to Social Work Education

Social justice is a primary value of social work and therefore has a place in discussions of social work education pedagogy. This is especially true for conversations pertaining to students who are underprepared, due to educational inequalities, for successful completion of writing assignments at the undergraduate level. If underprepared students are treated as equals to prepared students, then the social inequalities that contributed to or caused a student to be underprepared are perpetuated rather than challenged. The authors explore responses to underprepared students that are consistent with social work's professional value of social justice.     

中国县级政府间财力差距：1993-2003年

 摘　　要:本文利用1993-2003年中国县级地区的财政数据，借鉴收入分配文献中发展出来的地区子集和收入来源不平等分解法，对县级政府财力差距进行了分析，发现中国县级政府财力差距十分悬殊，且财力不均等存在上升趋势；大部分财力不均等是由组内差异解释的，地区间差距对不均等的贡献相对较小；上级财政转移支付不但没有起到均等县级财力的作用，反而拉大了财力差异，特别是在分税制改革后，转移支付造成了近一半的县级财力差异     

What's in the “old boys” network? Accessing social capital in gendered and racialized networks

Network processes have long been implicated in the reproduction of labor market inequality, but it remains unclear whether white male networks provide more social capital resources than female and minority networks. Analysis of nationally representative survey data reveals that people in white male networks receive twice as many job leads as people in female/minority networks. White male networks are also comprised of higher status connections than female/minority networks. The information and status benefits of membership in these old boy networks accrue to all respondents and not just white men. Furthermore, gender homophilous contacts offer greater job finding assistance than other contacts. The results specify how social capital flows through gendered and racialized networks.     

农村教育领域的性别不平等与贫困

中国农村教育领域的性别不平等主要表现在对子女教育期望的性别差异、学校设置性别意识的缺失、家庭教育资源分配的性别差异、男女生受教育年限的差异等方面。传统的观念、传统劳动分工模式和社会安全保障体系的缺乏等因素影响了农村教育的性别模式,贫困也是影响教育性别不平等的重要因素。中国贫困农村的农户由于多种生计资本供给不足,而呈现出非常典型的男孩优先的教育模式,从而导致妇女陷入多元贫困状态。     

Compensating differentials, labor market segmentation, and wage inequality

Two literatures on work and the labor market draw attention to the importance of non-pecuniary job amenities. Social psychological perspectives on work suggest that workers have preferences for a range of job amenities (e.g. Halaby, 2003). The compensating differentials hypothesis predicts that workers navigate tradeoffs among different job amenities such that wage inequality overstates inequality in utility (Smith, 1979). This paper joins these perspectives by constructing a new measure of labor market success that evaluates the degree to which workers’ job amenity preferences and outcomes match. This measure of subjective success is used to predict workers’ job satisfaction and to test the hypothesis that some degree of labor force inequality in wages is due to preference-based tradeoffs among all job amenities. Findings demonstrate that the new measure predicts workers’ job satisfaction and provides evidence for the presence of compensating differentials in the primary and intermediate, but not secondary, labor markets.     

Investigating the organizational sources of high-wage earnings growth and rising inequality

Recent studies indicate that the growth of earnings inequality in the United States since the late 1970s reflects organizational changes in the process of earnings determination. Existing research primarily focuses on workplace changes that reduce earnings levels for middle- and low-wage workers despite the importance of high-wage gains for rising inequality. This paper investigates how organizational context affects the relationship between occupation and earnings, with a focus on high-wage occupations. The earnings associated with low-wage occupations do not vary across industry groups. By contrast, the earnings advantages associated with high-wage occupations vary across industry groups in relation to the industry’s prevalence of performance pay practices. Pay initiatives that reward individuals for company performance explain much of the inter-industry variance in managerial and professional earnings slopes. The growth of performance-based pay represents an organizational change in earnings determination that may serve as a mechanism of high-wage earnings growth and rising inequality.     

Visible and invisible hands intertwined: State-market symbiotic interactions and changing income inequality in urban China

Analyzing the restructured political economy in 21st-century urban China, this project develops a “symbiotic interaction” model and reconceptualizes the state-market relationship to appreciate the changing inequality patterns. As the state and market have formed a long-term, intimate relationship, dynamic state policies interact with the fragmented labor market to redefine a set of socioeconomic capitals and statuses in affecting income inequality. Drawing empirical evidence from the Chinese General Social Survey 2003 and 2013 data, this paper employs linear and unconditional quantile regressions to compare income disparity patterns along both temporal and socio-spatial dimensions. The findings show that multiple key factors, including human capital (e.g., college education), political capital (e.g., party membership), occupational status (e.g., self-employment), and organizational type (e.g., state-owned enterprise), have all changed their economic returns over time and also played different roles for various earning groups. These findings suggest that we should conduct substantive institutional analyses of the evolving state-market relationship and their interplay to achieve a deeper understanding of the reshuffled stratification order in contemporary China. The proposed analytical framework also has broad implications in the research of other transitional economies.     

Imposing and Testing Curvature Conditions on a Box–Cox Cost Function

We present a new method for imposing and testing concavity of cost functions using asymptotic least squares, which can be easily implemented even for nonlinear cost functions. We provide an illustration for a (generalized) Box–Cox cost function with six inputs: capital, labor disaggregated in three skill levels, energy, and intermediate materials. We present a parametric concavity test and compare price elasticities when curvature conditions are imposed versus when they are not. Although concavity is statistically rejected, estimates are not very sensitive to its imposition. We find stronger substitution between the different type of labor than between any other two inputs.     

Statistical inference for the quintile share ratio

In recent years, the Quintile Share Ratio (or QSR) has become a very popular measure of inequality. In 2001, the European Council decided that income inequality in European Union member states should be described using two indicators: the Gini Index and the QSR. The QSR is generally defined as the ratio of the total income earned by the richest 20% of the population relative to that earned by the poorest 20%. Thus, it can be expressed using quantile shares, where a quantile share is the share of total income earned by all of the units up to a given quantile. The aim of this paper is to propose an improved methodology for the estimation and variance estimation of the QSR in a complex sampling design framework. Because the QSR is a non-linear function of interest, the estimation of its sampling variance requires advanced methodology. Moreover, a non-trivial obstacle in the estimation of quantile shares in finite populations is the non-unique definition of a quantile. Thus, two different conceptions of the quantile share are presented in the paper, leading us to two different estimators of the QSR. Regarding variance estimation, [Osier, 2006] and [Osier, 2009] proposed a variance estimator based on linearization techniques. However, his method involves Gaussian kernel smoothing of cumulative distribution functions. Our approach, also based on linearization, shows that no smoothing is needed. The construction of confidence intervals is discussed and a proposition is made to account for the skewness of the sampling distribution of the QSR. Finally, simulation studies are run to assess the relevance of our theoretical results.