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Despite established links among persistent unemployment, low wages, and children's economic well-being, social scientists have yet to document how variability in work hours is linked to child poverty. Our knowledge of the safety net's heterogeneous responses to work-hour instability is also limited. This is of critical importance for scholars and policymakers. Using nationally representative data collected every 4 months, this paper examines how intra-year work-hour volatility is related to child poverty, measured through both the official poverty measure (OPM) and the supplemental poverty measure (SPM). It further assesses varying degrees of buffering effects of cash, in-kind benefits, and tax transfers on income in the context of work-hour volatility. Results indicate that more than one in four households (26%) facing the greatest volatility lived under the poverty line. Black and Hispanic children, as well as those living with unpartnered single mothers, faced substantially higher variability in household market hours worked. Hispanic children experienced not only greater volatility in their caregivers' work hours but also higher poverty level, even after taking government programs into account. In-kind benefits are more effective in buffering household income declines resulting from unstable work hours, followed by tax transfers and cash benefits. The effectiveness of near-cash benefits is particularly salient among Black children and children of single mothers. These results provide new evidence to inform policy discussions surrounding the best ways to help socioeconomically disadvantaged families to retain benefits and smooth their income in the face of frequent variation in work hours and, thus, earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parental child-related spending represents an important pathway to promote children's human capital development and material well-being. It is also, however, a pathway that perpetuates social inequalities given the well-known socioeconomic divide in parental spending on children. Although several studies have documented the extent to which current family income is associated with spending on children, we still know little about the causal effects of additional income on child-related spending across the socioeconomic strata. In this paper, I examine the effects of income gains due to universal and unconditional cash transfers from the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend on child-related spending. Using longitudinal household expenditure data from the 1996–2015 Consumer Expenditure Surveys, I exploit exogenous variation in the generosity of the Alaska Dividend to estimate short- and long-term disparities in parental expenditures resulting from payouts. Results provide a unique opportunity to compare the behavior of high- and low-income parents after an income boost. I find that low- and middle-income parents use cash transfers to catch up with their more affluent counterparts in the short and long term. Low-income parents are, however, unable to keep up with the long-term increases in child-related spending made by their middle-income counterparts. Implications of results for the reproduction of socioeconomic inequalities and for current and proposed cash-transfer policies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many households, energy consumption represents a non-discretionary portion of their budget and directly relates to quality of life. As researchers continue to study the environmental impacts of energy behavior, it is important to explore how energy consumption relates to socio-economic wellbeing. This paper examines the economic impacts of being energy-burdened in the United States, defined as spending at least 10% of household income on heating and electricity services; energy burdens are partially, but not entirely, driven by income, since energy needs and costs can vary substantially due to housing characteristics, utility rates, and other factors. Using panel data of US household income and energy expenditures during 1999–2017, this analysis demonstrates that energy-burdened households were at about 150%–200% greater risk of transitioning into or extending the duration of economic poverty over a two-year timeframe relative to non-burdened households. This analysis indicates that dedicating inordinate amounts of income to energy services can threaten a household's economic well-being over time, possibly by preventing a household from engaging in other economic activities or compounding existing economic hardship. These results emphasize the importance of energy assistance and energy efficiency for low-income households, drawing attention to how structures of energy consumption, the welfare state, and social stratification intertwine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical and recent accounts of education posit that education legitimately, and authoritatively, classifies individuals to positions of lower or higher status. However, despite these general theoretical claims, empirical evidence that provides an in-depth picture of the relationship between educational attainment and social status remains scarce. In this paper, based on a dataset of 31 countries (International Social Survey Programme), we investigate the extent to which education is related to subjective social status, the degree to which this is seen as legitimate, and how this relationship varies between countries. We contextualize this relationship with the influence of the centrality of education in countries (operationalized as the share of higher educated). Results showed that education is an important source of subjective social status for individuals across all countries, and is seen as relatively legitimate and uncontroversial among all educational groups. Moreover, among those who perceive education to be more important for status, subjective status differences between educational groups are larger. Additionally, in countries with larger shares of higher educated, educational differences in subjective social status correlate more strongly with whether or not people obtained a degree of higher (tertiary) education. Lastly, the relationship between education and subjective social status in these countries is more independent from other sources of status, such as income and gender. It therefore seems to be that as higher education becomes more central and widely shared in a society, rather than leveling social differences, ironically it also becomes more distinctive and diagnostic in distinguishing people along group lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stratification and inequality are among the most central concepts in sociology, and although related, they are fundamentally distinct: inequality refers to the extent to which resources are distributed unevenly across individuals or between population subgroups, whereas stratification refers to the extent to which population subgroups occupy distinct hierarchical layers within an overall resource distribution. Despite the centrality of stratification in theories of class structure, prior empirical studies have focused exclusively on measures of inequality, which do not accurately capture the degree of class stratification and suffer from a variety of methodological limitations. In this paper, we employ a novel rank-based index of stratification to measure the degree to which occupational classes inhabit distinct, non-overlapping, and hierarchically arranged layers in the distribution of personal market income. The stratification index is nonparametric, both scale and translation invariant, and independent of the level of inequality. Based on this index, our results show that the US income distribution is highly stratified by occupational class and that the degree of class stratification increased substantially from 1980 to 2016. Moreover, we find that this trend is almost entirely due to growing stratification among aggregate occupational classes rather than among the disaggregate occupations nested within them. Finally, a set of counterfactual analyses indicate that the rise of occupational class stratification is driven by increases in the income returns to education, deunionization, and deindustrialization, although the relative importance of these factors varies by gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single mothers' relatively high levels of poverty are well documented, but the role that intergenerational coresidence may play in mitigating this disadvantage is not well understood. In this paper, we use multiple rounds of a large national survey between 1986 and 2007 (n = 67,252) to evaluate the extent to which income sharing via intergenerational coresidence limits poverty among single mothers in Japan. Results indicate that conventional poverty rates based on single-mother households overstate the prevalence of poverty among single mothers by 12–20 percent as a result of excluding those who are coresiding with parents. We find no evidence that the prevalence of intergenerational coresidence has changed in a way that would offset the poverty-increasing effect of growth in single parenthood. Finally, we show not only that shared income is the most important factor in limiting poverty among single mothers living with parents, but also that many single mothers are coresiding with parents who are themselves economically disadvantaged. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding relationships between rapid family change and poverty in countries like Japan, where public income support for single mothers is limited and where family support via intergenerational coresidence is both common and normative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABSTRACT This paper tests two divergent explanations of income: one model based on human capital variables, the other based on neo-Marxian, structural variables. In particular, our paper extends the work of political economists and the very recent work of sociologists (especially, Bibb and Form, Beck et al., and Wright and Perrone). Our sample was a national one drawn from a larger study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center; the final sample consisted of 763 members of the labor force (415 males and 348 females). While the human capital variables produced greater explained variance than the structural variables, in a combined model the structural variables increased the explanatory power by 27 percent. The structural model worked better for men; the human capital model worked better for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people in the United States have achieved economic stability through self-employment and are often seen as embracing the entrepreneurial spirit and seizing opportunity. Yet, research also suggests that self-employment may be precarious for many people in the lower socioeconomic strata. Drawing on a unique dataset that combines longitudinal survey data with administrative tax data for a sample of low- and moderate-income (LMI) workers, we bring new evidence to bear on this debate by examining the link between self-employment and economic insecurity. Overall, our results show that self-employment is associated with greater economic insecurity among LMI workers compared with wage-and-salary employment. For instance, compared with their wage-and-salary counterparts, the self-employed have 78, 168, and 287 percent greater odds of having an income below basic expenses, and experiencing an unexpected income decline and high levels of income volatility, respectively. We also find that differences in financial endowment and access to health insurance are key drivers in explaining the relationship between employment type and economic insecurity, as being able to access $2,000 in an emergency greatly lowers the odds of budgetary constraint, whereas lack of health insurance increases those odds. These findings suggest that formal work arrangements with wages and benefits offered by an employer promotes greater economic stability among LMI workers compared with informal work arrangements via self-employment. We discuss implications of these results for future research and policy initiatives seeking to promote economic wellbeing through entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Partners increasingly resemble each other in terms of earnings across Western countries. These increases in earnings similarity are often considered to be drivers behind growing income inequality between households. We argue that increases in earnings similarity do not necessarily lead to augmented inequality between households. Their overall effect depends on whether and how the processes that increase earnings similarity affect inequality through other pathways. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study on 21 countries, we decompose changes over time in earnings inequality. We show that even though the correlation in earnings between partners increased in most countries, this only amplified inequality on some occasions. In several countries, increases in the earnings correlation are driven by general changes in employment rates. Given that these increases in employment equalized earnings across households through other pathways, the inherently connected increases in the earnings correlation are of less concern from an inequality perspective. In other countries, where increases in earnings similarity are produced by augmented similarity in earnings among dual-breadwinner couples or by selective changes in employment, increases in earnings similarity are of more concern for inequality between households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the inequality of household income has increased globally. A common trend is increased income inequality at the top of the distribution. The sources of this trend are a matter of debate. Increased demand for analytical and managerial skills is said to have strongly increased labor incomes at the top. Other scholars have indicated that structural conditions, such as financialization or favorable taxation, have benefited top-earning households. Here, we contribute to the latter line of reasoning. We show that payroll taxes exempt parts of high labor incomes, reinforcing income inequality at the top. Such taxation has large fiscal volume and redistributive power. However, our knowledge about the distributional consequences of payroll taxation as a tax scheme is remarkably thin. Many countries, such as Germany and the United States, restrict payroll taxes to a maximum amount, resulting in significant payroll tax–exempted incomes for high-earning households. Strongly growing top-labor incomes thus lead to increased payroll tax–exempted incomes for households at the upper parts of the distribution and, consequently, to higher income inequality. We use Germany (1992–2017), a highly redistributive country, as a case study. Our empirical results suggest that: (1) households increasingly profit from payroll-exempted labor incomes across the upper quarter; (2) this benefit has increased over time; and (3) increased amounts of payroll tax–exempted labor income explain up to 60 percent of income dispersion at the top of the distribution. We discuss the generalizability of our case study for other countries, especially the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Atheoretical formulation derived from the cumulative advantage literature, that intergenerational educational mobility has enduring life-course income effects above and beyond individuals' education, is empirically tested. This formulation contrasts sharply with both the human capital model, which does not consider parental education as a determinant of children's income, and the sociological research on social mobility, which mostly relies on a snapshot view to study the economic consequences of educational mobility. To test this theory, we use NLSY79 survey data (with Panel Study of Income Dynamics data serving for robustness checks). We apply growth models to the data to estimate if and how the different intergenerational educational mobility groups that are produced by the intersection of parental and respondent education shape life-course income trajectories. Results provide evidence in support of the argument that the intersection of parental and respondent education bears important long-term income consequences, mainly for men. These results, moreover, do not vary by race. We discuss the theoretical and policy implications of our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Most previous cross-national research on income inequality has been insensitive to issues concerning the quality of the data. This paper builds on recent work by Menard (1986) in examining the comparability of various types of income inequality data. Specifically, I suggest that comparability of the data will be enhanced (and research findings will be more trustworthy) if we are more stringent concerning the definition and measurement of the key concept: income. Income distribution data for 61 nations which take this factor into account are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper gives a cross-national comparison, involving West German, Dutch, and United States data, on the use of social ties in the job-search process. Data for West Germany and the Netherlands are compared with the Lin et al. research on Albany-Schenectady and Troy. The findings show that (1) there is more use of informal sources in the U.S. than in West Germany and the Netherlands; (2) informal sources do not generally lead to higher occupational prestige and income; (3) for the Dutch data (no West German data are available for this question) greater social resources, that is, a contact person with relatively high prestige, do lead to a job with a higher prestige, though effects are less pronounced than found by Lin et al.; and (4) an extension of the Lin et al. analysis shows that these social resources do not have a significant impact on income. This last finding is consistent with the recent results of Marsden and Hurlbert's analysis of Detroit Area Study data. Institutional differences that might be relevant to the explanation of cross-national differences are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The relation between sociodemographic factors and racial group identification is explored in this paper. Previous research suffers from important limitations which have led to much confusion in this area of research. For this and other reasons, the sociodemographic determinants of racial group identification have been little studied. Using data from a national sample of black adults, the findings of this research indicate that racial group identification is strongest among older blacks and the least-educated blacks who live in urban areas. Additionally, significant interactions between education and region are found; highly educated blacks living outside the West have strong levels of racial group identification. Income and sex are not found to be related to racial group identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper examines the effects of residence in metropolitan areas and migration from nonmetropolitan areas to metropolitan areas on the earnings of American Indian and Alaskan Native householders aged 25-54 The results indicate that: (1) the earnings of metropolitan Indians are markedly higher than those of nonmetropolitan Indians, but the earnings of nonmetropolitan-to-metropolitan migrants are very little more than those of nonmetropolitan stayers; and, (2) the difference in earnings between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan Indians is due to better opportunities in metropolitan areas and to the interaction between these opportunities and the higher levels of human capital of metropolitan Indians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper evaluates dual economy theory and research on the problem of sex differences in earnings. General Social Survey data are used to demonstrate that (1) the four most commonly used measures of the dual economy (Beck, Horan & Tolbert 1978; Bibb & Form 1977; Hodson 1977; Tolbert, Horan & Beck 1980) are extremely inconsistent when allocating women and men to industrial sectors, (2) the inconsistency results in markedly different empirical estimates of the role of the dual economy in generating sex differences in earnings, and (3) the dual economy measures provide only modest support--if any at all--for hypotheses derived from dual economy theory. In the dosing section I consider the use of multiple, continuous measures of industrial structure in dual economy research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Sociologists disagree about the measurement of one of the core concepts in the discipline--socioeconomic status. In recent years the Duncan set has come to be accepted as a "standard measure," however, its interpretation, particularly when it is used in conjunction with income and education remains in dispute. Moreover, there is suspicion on the part of at least some sociologists that using the three measures together in a single regression equation results in collinearity problems. This paper first suggests an interpretation of the SEI score in terms of the contextual effects associated with occupations and then examines the statistical properties of equations containing education, SEI, and income. Using statistics derived from ridge regression, we conclude that multicollinearity is not likely to be a serious problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's comments on the research by George Lord III and William Falk entitled An Exploratory Analysis of Individualist Versus Structuralist Explanations of Income that appeared in the December 1980 issue of Social Forces. The article presents methodological problems that may be intrinsic to the testing of hypotheses derived from neo-Marxian analytical categories. My objections pertain as well to several other papers on the relationship between individual earnings and industrial segmentation in the U.S. As Lord and Falk correctly suggest, American Marxists codified a fundamental premise of capital, the logical tendency toward capital concentration in industry, and developed a structural representation of advanced capitalism. The resulting so-called dual economy is characterized by a monopoly sector of large, capital-intensive oligopolies; a competitive sector of smaller, more labor-intensive competing firms; and the state. With others, Lord and Falk have hypothesized that monopoly sector employment is superior in wages, benefits, and opportunities for advancement to jobs in the competitive sector, thus joining together a neo-Marxian dual economy model with a theory of labor market segmentation.

ABSTRACT Aggregate analyses of sexual inequality fail to explore directly the resources of structurally induced earnings differences. These differences may derive from between- and/or within-employer differences in the rewardattainment processes of working men and women. This paper examines the second of these two issues, i.e., within-employer sex differences in salary for the same job. Two hypotheses are considered: the so-called wage discrimination hypothesis refers to inequality generated by male-female differences in the direct rates of return to productive resources and hierarchical rank; the rank segregation hypothesis refers to inequality generated by denying women equal access to the higher-paying ranks to which a particular job ladder leads. Our results suggest that sex differences in salary attainment result more from rank segregation than from wage discrimination per se. The implications for the problem of sexual discrimination and the generalizability of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the ecological problem of how a territorial system is organized around a metropolitan center or system of such centers. We hypothesize that accessibility to the metropolitan system is inversely related to the degree of internal heterogeneity or differentiation of nonmetropolitan cities. Measuring differentiation on four variables: industry, occupation, education, and income, we find general support for this proposition. Ecological theory bearing on these problems also suggests that such specialization derives from trade interdependencies that grow with increased accessibility to the total territorial system. We interpret this to mean that the degree of industrial differentiation in a community mediates the relation between accessibility and other dimensions of differentiation. Again, the evidence seems to support this prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The degree of change in the hierarchy of occupations over long periods is the focus of this paper. Our concern is with the mechanism by which the hierarchy changes. Taxable wealth of incumbents of detailed occupations from 1789 Philadelphia is related to income data from the last three dicennial censuses. Several models of how change might occur are evaluated. We conclude that (1) change in occupational reward differentials is slower than previous estimates, and (2) the first-order causal mechanism by which change in the hierarchy has been presumed to take place is implausible. We also note within-occupation variability in assets of approximately the same magnitude in the two periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper demonstrates that the stability of family income inequality in the postwar period derives from countervailing forces for greater and lesser inequality. Declining inequality among single-headed families and unrelated individuals has been offset by an increase in the percent of total inequality attributable to income differences between family types. Population shifts between family types also have influenced the distribution of income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Metropolitan communities in the United States are interdependent. Each metropolis serves the economy through its key functions while at the same time it depends on other metropolises and systems for some of its own needs. Using 1960 data for SMSAs, this paper demonstrates that a community's position in this differentiated system influences the characteristics of its population. Two perspectives for determining a metropolitan community's key functions are used: one considers economic activities one at a time; the other considers the entire configuration of these activities at once. These two procedures are compared in their ability to identify groups of communities having distinctive social structures, as indicated by occupational and educational composition, income level, age and sex structure, and ability to attract and hold migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of income volatility in western countries has been extensively documented in the literature, but empirical research has just started to examine how childhood exposure to family income volatility affects subsequent wellbeing. This study takes advantage of several nation-wide, population registers from Sweden with linkages within and across generations to examine the intergenerational impact of childhood family income volatility on psychiatric disorders in early adulthood. In addition to the population-average effects, we also examine the heterogeneity in the impact of family income volatility for families at the top, bottom, and middle of the family income distribution. Our results suggest that after controlling for a set of family- and child-level characteristics, childhood family income volatility has a negative effect on mental wellbeing, and this finding is consistent across a range of psychiatric outcomes. Furthermore, we show that while children from low-income families exhibit the greatest likelihood of psychiatric disorder, children from families in the middle of the income distribution experience the greatest negative impact of income volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Payday lenders, check cashers, and other "alternative" financial services (AFS) have garnered attention from policymakers and advocates for the poor because they are more expensive than traditional banking—constituting what some call a "Ghetto Tax." This is the first study to explore neighborhood-level AFS geography on the national scale. Leveraging a dataset comprising the universe of AFS in 2015, I show that not only are there substantial differences in AFS presence between white and non-white neighborhoods, but that these disparities are largest in the most segregated metropolitan areas. This finding supports theories that racial segregation creates easily identifiable markets for institutions to avoid, target, and exploit. I further show that while AFS presence declines with neighborhood income, the gap between black and white neighborhoods is widest among high-income neighborhoods, reflecting the unique vulnerability of even affluent blacks to institutional marginalization. This work documents how the overlapping geographies of racial isolation and AFS prevalence shape the very cost of money for different racial groups, illustrating the importance of institutions transmitting the effects of racial isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Norwegian national policies strongly incentivize double-earner households and gender equality, but various gender gaps persist both at work and at home. In these seemingly contradictory situations, what are the mechanisms under which Norwegian households allocate their market and domestic labor? Drawing on both a large set of administrative data and a representative survey, this question is examined from two perspectives. First, we focus on the micro-economic processes and investigate if Norwegian households act according to economic rationality or if they still follow the gender norm "A man should earn more than his wife." Second, we focus on how Norway's contextual factors may influence the household experiences when a wife has better market productivity. We find that a wife with better market productivity, who is thereby facing the risk of outearning her husband, works more hours and earns more than her husband, while doing less chores—behavior consistent with economic rationality. Further analyses show that women's "higher" relative market productivity is mainly a consequence of having low-income husbands, and "higher" and "lower" market productivity women are surprisingly similar in other sociodemographic aspects. Norwegian redistribution policies, through progressive taxation and benefit transfers, seem to mitigate the income differences and promote gender neutrality in a sense that if couples wish to pursue an untraditional division, by preference or by necessity, they seem to be able to do so without being held back by the traditional gender expectations or being very poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While flexibility in the location of work hours has shown positive organizational effects on productivity and retention, less is known about the earnings effects of telecommuting. We analyze weekly hours spent working from home using the 1989–2008 panels of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. We describe the demographic and occupational characteristics of the employees engaged in telecommuting, then track their earnings growth with fixed-effects models, focusing on gender and parental status. Results show substantial variation in the earnings effects of telecommuting based on the point in the hours distribution worked from home. Working from home rather than the office produces equal earnings growth in the first 40 hours worked, but “taking work home” or overtime telecommuting yields significantly smaller increases than overtime worked on-site. Yet, most observed telecommuting occurs precisely during this low-yield overtime portion of the hours distribution. Few gender or parental status differences emerged in these processes. These trends reflect potentially widespread negative consequences of the growing capacity of workers to perform their work from any location. Rather than enhancing true flexibility in when and where employees work, the capacity to work from home mostly extends the workday and encroaches into what was formerly home and family time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We contribute to the literature on positional goods and subjective well-being by providing new evidence on the following questions: Is the effect of income on subjective well-being mainly relative or absolute? Does the intensity of social comparison condition the effect of income on well-being? Does the reference group for comparison condition this effect? We present results from the Social Status, Consumption, and Happiness Survey, a national survey of Americans conducted in 2012. The findings suggest that the more highly individuals rate their income relative to others, the happier they are; that individuals who find it important to compare their income to that of others are less happy; and that the reference group that is salient for comparison conditions the association between income and well-being. We situate these findings in the literatures on the dynamics of inequality, social comparison, and well-being [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Female life expectancy is currently shorter in the United States than in most high-income countries. This study examines work-family context as a potential explanation. While work-family context changed similarly across high-income countries during the past half century, the United States has not implemented institutional supports, such as universally available childcare and family leave, to help Americans contend with these changes. We compare the United States to Finland--a country with similar trends in work-family life but generous institutional supports--and test two hypotheses to explain US women's longevity disadvantage: (1) US women may be less likely than Finnish women to combine employment with childrearing; and (2) US women's longevity may benefit less than Finnish women's longevity from combining employment with childrearing. We used data from women aged 30-60 years during 1988-2006 in the US National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File and harmonized it with data from Finnish national registers. We found stronger support for hypothesis 1, especially among low-educated women. Contrary to hypothesis 2, combining employment and childrearing was not less beneficial for US women's longevity. In a simulation exercise, more than 75 percent of US women's longevity disadvantage was eliminated by raising their employment levels to Finnish levels and reducing mortality rates of non-married/non-employed US women to Finnish rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades, a dedicated collection of scholars have examined the matter of skin tone stratification within the black American population and found that complexion has significant net effects on a variety of stratification outcomes. These analyses relied heavily on data collected between 1950 and 1980. In particular, many scholars have utilized the National Survey of Black Americans (1979–1980). This leaves the question of whether or not the effect of skin tone on stratification outcomes remains decades later. Newly available data from the National Survey of American Life (2001–2003) are used to examine this question. I find that skin tone is significantly associated with black Americans' educational attainment, household income, occupational status, and even the skin tone and educational attainment of their spouses. Consequently, this study demonstrates that skin tone stratification among black Americans persists into the 21st century. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of ethnoracial inequality in the United States and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on social inequality and the family has indicated that partners are relevant to individuals' labor market decisions. Unemployment is a particularly interesting issue in the partnership context because the ensuing loss of income may affect the entire family. Against this background, we examine how singles and couples differ in terms of unemployment duration and how a partner's income and labor market–related resources influence re-employment. Considering the gender and class differences in labor market participation, we are particularly interested in variations in partner support between men and women in differing economic circumstances.Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), we find that cohabitation accelerates re-employment, whereas marriage increases the prospect of re-employment only for men. More specifically, the partner's labor market resources facilitate re-employment. Although partner income has no effect in absolute terms, unemployed men and women who were formerly minor earners refrain from re-entering paid work. This pattern is more pronounced among low- and medium-income couples than among high-income families. Unemployment thus strengthens patterns of inequality both between and within couples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The shirking and gift exchange models of efficiency wage theory anchor an analysis of the effect of supervision on pay and effort. The contribution hinges on remedying conceptual and analytical limitations of past research to achieve more discriminating tests of the models. The models are supported with respect to pay and effort: (1) autonomous workers are paid more and are more willing to work harder for their employer; (2) workers whose productivity is difficult to evaluate are paid more but are less willing to work harder; and (3) higher pay elicits greater willingness to work harder. Contrary to the models, there is no evidence that sectoral wage differences are due to differences in supervision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study estimates the level of intergenerational transmission of income in Finland and assesses the contribution of parental and personal socioeconomic and demographic characteristics to this relationship. We used a longitudinal register-based data set covering two decades and selected cohorts born between 1973 and 1976 for analysis. The results demonstrate strong intergenerationality, with those from the lowest and highest income quintiles being the most probable to remain in the same income quintile in adulthood. Approximately half of these associations are attributable to parental characteristics among men and by personal characteristics among women. Our results further show complex interactive effects, with higher-income parents unable to entirely protect their offspring from the negative impact that unemployment, single parenting, and living alone has on personal income levels. These findings demonstrate significant and multifaceted intergenerational continuities in income level even in a Nordic welfare state such as Finland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Stratification research documents that income inequality is on the rise. Common explanations include changes in technology, demography, and labor market institutions. This study documents an additional driver of inequality that has been critical to the concentration of income among elites: income from investments. As they have turned to their investment portfolios for income, economic elites have become less reliant on the returns to labor. This finding indicates that the current debate over elite incomes, which tends to focus on the rise of “the working rich,” needs to be expanded to include the role of income-producing wealth. Additionally, such changes have left a dramatic imprint on the entire income distribution, with investment income contributing to a growing share of overall income inequality. While family structure, labor markets, and technological change remain important topics in the study of income inequality, the findings presented here underscore the additional importance of wealth and property ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Does the concentration of recent Latino immigrants into occupational linguistic niches—occupations with large numbers of other Spanish speakers—restrict their wage growth? On the one hand, it is possible that Latino immigrants who are concentrated in jobs with large numbers of Spanish speakers may have less on-the-job exposure to English, which may isolate them socially and linguistically and limit their subsequent economic mobility. On the other hand, working in linguistic niches can also be beneficial for upwardly mobile immigrants if it allows them to gain a foothold in the United States while they improve their English skills and develop labor market experience. Using data from the 1996, 2001 and 2004 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we test for the effect of working in occupational linguistic niches on wages and wage growth. The results show that while workers in linguistic niche occupations earn lower wages on average, they do not experience lower rates of wage growth over time. Moreover, we find that about 20 percent of workers who start the 4-year SIPP panel in linguistic niches experience occupational mobility that reduces the percentage of workers speaking Spanish in their occupation by over 10 percent over the course of the study, and these “movers” have higher levels of wage growth than other workers in the sample. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Income inequality has been increasing in the United States, and intraoccupational processes are partly responsible (Kim and Sakamoto 2008; Mouw and Kalleberg 2010). To date, scholars have focused on suboccupational divisions, such as specialty areas, to understand why some members of an occupation earn more than others. In this article we theorize, operationalize, and assess the economic effect of another way in which members of the same profession can be distinguished: by the extent to which they specialize. Using two large secondary datasets on lawyers in the United States, we find that lawyers who specialize earn more. This effect arises partly through two mechanisms—individual productivity and firm size—and depends upon specialty area prestige: lawyers in low-prestige areas actually benefit more from specializing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Policy reforms and rising income inequality transformed educational and economic opportunities for Americans approaching midlife in the 1990s. Rising income inequality may have reduced mobility, as income gaps increased between rich and poor children. Against the effects of rising inequality, Civil Rights reforms may have increased mobility, as opportunities expanded across cohorts of black students and workers. We compare educational and income mobility for two cohorts of black and white men, the older born in the late 1940s and the younger born in the early 1960s. We find that educational mobility increased for black men, but income mobility declined for both races. Economic mobility declined despite unchanged or improved educational mobility because of increased returns to schooling and increased intergenerational income correlations, independent of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

According to popular accounts, the nonprofit sector has become increasingly commercialized in recent years. This article reviews the empirical literature on the commercialization trend and discusses why it is regarded as significant by scholars of civil society. It then provides fresh analyses of nonprofit revenue streams and concludes that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there has not been a "commercial turn," if this is to be understood as a new material reliance on earned, non-donated income by nonprofit organizations throughout the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of family income .for religious participation in the United States has been largely ignored in recent decades. Addressing this neglect, we focus our attention primarily upon white Catholics, the poorer of whom we reason have fewer options to participate in the context of an increasingly middle-class Church. Analyzing the 1972 2006 cumulative General Social Survey data, we show that net of all other factors low- income white Catholics attend church less often than other white Catholics, although social integration mechanisms significantly moderate the effects of income. Additional analyses suggest that the effects of income on church attendance are greatest for the younger white Catholic cohort. In contrast, the role of income in Latino Catholics' attendance is relatively weak. In our conclusion, we attempt to integrate our most puzzling finding -- having children in the home does not increase the church attendance of low-income white Catholics -- with our main theoretical line of argument concerning the central role of social integration in understanding the impact of income on religious participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assess the impact of the welfare state on cross-national variation in the gender wage gap. Earnings inequality between men and women is conceptualized as resulting from their different locations in the class hierarchy, combined with the severity of wage differentials between and within classes. This decomposition contributes to identifying the relevant dimensions of welfare states and testing their impact on women's relative earnings. Our empirical analysis is based on income and occupation-based indicators of class and utilizes microdata for 17 post-industrial societies. We find systematic differences between welfare regimes in the components of the gender gap. The evidence supports our claim that the state molds gender inequality in labor market attainments by influencing women's class positions and regulating class inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that community-level poverty is associated with access to health care net of individual-level characteristics, but no research investigates whether this association differs by individual-level income. Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Health Resource and Services Administration, I find that the negative relationship between the prevalence of poverty in communities and access to health care is much stronger for middle- and high-income individuals than for those in lower-income groups. I suggest that individuals may benefit from living among those in similar economic circumstances because they face similar obstacles to obtaining medical are. For poor individuals, the collective knowledge and experience embedded in poor communities may compensate for the otherwise negative influence of community-level poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are sizeable earnings differentials by gender and race in the U.S. labor market, with women earning less than men and most racial/ethnic minority groups earning less than whites. It has been proposed in the previous literature that the effects of gender and race on earnings are additive, so that minority women suffer the full disadvantage of each status. We test this proposition for a broad range of minority groups in the United States. We find that women of all minority groups suffer a smaller gender penalty than white women (relative to same-race men). Exploring the potential role of racial variation in gender role specialization in producing such differentials, we find some empirical evidence suggesting that white families specialize more than families of most other races. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine age variation in the effects of socioeconomic status (SES) on self-rated health in Korea by including three alternative indicators of SES--liquid assets, home ownership, and real estate ownership--as well as two standard measures of education and household income. Furthermore, I consider the SES-health relationship and its variation by age for men and women separately. The empirical findings in general do not support the hypothesis that the SES gap in health converges with age. Most SES effects on self-rated health remain constant across age groups or even increase with age. However, there is evidence of the converging effects of household income and liquid assets for women. Differences in self-rated health by household income or liquid assets diverge and then converge as age advances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic segregation increased in the U.S. between 1970 and 1990. Three hypotheses suggest that economic segregation affects low-income children's educational attainment, but they provide different predictions about the direction of the effect. I combine census data with data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to show that an increase in economic segregation between census tracts in the same state hardly changes overall educational attainment but it exacerbates inequality between high-income and low-income children. With overall inequality held constant changes in economic inequality within census tracts have little effect on low-income children's educational attainment. But changes in inequality between census tracts reduce the educational attainment of low-income children. Substituting segregation between school districts for segregation between census tracts yields the same conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the effect of marketization on personal income inequality in urban China as mediated by three types of work units: low-profit state firms (LPFs), high-profit state firms (HPFs), and market firm (MFs). Results based on two urban survey data sets show that while the influence of redistributive power declines, returns to human capital do not monotonically increase as a firm's proximity to the market increases. Although returns to human capital are higher in the market sector than in the state sector, the effects of education on earnings are weaker in HPFs than LPFs within the state sector. The inconsistency is attributed to the effects of bonuses that are equally distributed among employees in HPFs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several theoretical traditions offer insights into individual success in conventional activities We extend this work, suggesting that explanations of success also apply to crime: although prosperity in licit or illicit activities has several unique antecedents, success in either endeavor is influenced by common faactors. Most research on conventional success focuses on the effects of human and social capital, and criminal forms of these are important for illegal success. We argue that various aspects of conventional personal capital - a heightened desire for wealth, a propensity for risk-taking, a willingness to cooperate and competence - also play important roles in both legal and illegal prosperity. We demonstrate the importance of various types of capital, particularly the salience of personal capital, with data on drug-selling income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A state-level index of the conditions that Herrnstein and Murray suggest tightened the relationship between IQ and status in the past century as well as a measure of "credentialing by examination" are used to try to explain interstate variation in the association between IQ and status attainment circa 1990. The results contradict Herrnstein and Murray's interpretation and provide support for an alternative credentialing argument The more a state uses written, IQ-like examinations as screening devices for occupational access, the stronger the relationship between IQ and income. Thus; rather than higher IQ leading to status attainment because it indicates skills needed in a modern society, IQ may reflect the same test-taking abilities used in artificial screening devices by which status groups protect their domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has assessed the implications of entrepreneurship for immigrant incorporation by examining the hypothesis that self-employed immigrants earn higher incomes than other immigrant workers in the labor market. With the important exception of several pioneering ethnographic and case studies, however, little attention has been paid in the literature to whether immigrants who are not self-employed derive any income benefit from the activities of immigrants in their communities who have gone into business for themselves. In this article, we draw upon the ethnic entrepreneurship and urban ecological literatures to develop a hypothesis about how the relative size of the local ethnic market conditions the extent to which interurban variation in the self- employment rate of Mexican immigrants will influence the incomes of Mexican immigrants who are not self-employed. Further, we use data from the 1990 US. Census of Population and Housing to investigate this hypothesis for Mexican immigrants residing in sixty U.S. metropolitan statistical areas. Results from the analyses indicate that the effects of variation in levels of self-employment depend upon the relative size of the local ethnic market among cities with smaller ethnic markets, higher concentrations of self-employment are related to lower Mexican-immigrant earnings, while among cities with larger ethnic markets, higher concentrations of self-employment are related to small increases in wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the literature on the links between economic resources and the transition to marriage, this study examines the role of economic well-being in the formation of marital and cohabitational unions. I use event history models with data from a large longitudinal data set of young adults. In general, economic well-being has a weaker association with cohabitation than with marriage, but this differs by sex. Further, results suggest that both men and women who are economically unstable are likely to cohabit. The findings suggest that cohabitation may provide an attractive alternative for those who are in romantic relationships but lack the economic well-being required for marriage or lack the occupational stability that would make them attractive candidates for the long-term contract that marriage implies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early studies of the informal economy have alternately argued either that employment in this secondary economy reinforces social inequality or that it dilutes it. More recent studies argue chat the informal economy is varied in its types of jobs, simultaneously offering opportunities to many who would not have them in the formal economy, yet further exploiting others. National level survey data from South Africa, and the methods of stratification research are used in this study to examine employment in the informal economy and to compare levels of success attained in the informal and formal economies. Success in both economies tends to favor whites, men, and those with more education and experience; nonwhites, women, and the less educated are more likely to work in the informal economy. The key finding of this analysis is that success in terms of occupational status and income attainment follows patterns of stratification in the informal economy consistent with those in the formal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]