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Over the past several decades, citizenship status has become more important in immigrant lives and communities in the United States. Undocumented adults who arrived as children, the 1.5 generation, comprise a growing percentage of the immigrant population. Although they are similar to children of immigrants born in the United States (the second generation) they face a variety of barriers to integration due to their lack of legal status. Based on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork with mainly 1.5 and second generation Mexican-American men during a period of major healthcare reform, this paper addresses how citizenship status and embeddedness within multi-status communities impacts immigrant experiences in the healthcare domain. In particular, I argue that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has contributed to an institutionalization of the status differences and a further differentiation in the social integration of these groups of children of immigrants. The novel methodological approach and the data which emerges through fieldwork reveals important insights into the process whereby healthcare reforms have consequences for immigrant communities which I show through highlighting the status-signaling event that is generated through various forms of direct and indirect interaction with the ACA. The implications of this extend beyond healthcare, and I discuss its impact on issues including ethnic identity and psychological well-being. This paper makes contributions to both our understanding of intergroup dynamics in immigrant integration and the health implications of immigration policies more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most salient findings in research on immigration has been that immigrants experience substantial economic mobility as they accumulate more years in the host-society labor force and eventually approach earnings parity with their native-born counterparts. However, we do not know whether this progress is sustained in retirement. In this paper, I develop a framework of Latent Cumulative (Dis)advantage and hypothesize that even as immigrants are approaching parity with the native-born in terms of current earnings, they accumulate disadvantages in lifetime earnings, job benefits, and retirement planning that eventually lead them to have growing disadvantages in income in later life. Drawing on decades of longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, I find that while foreign- and native-born men in the United States both experience a decline in income after age 50, the decline is much more substantial among foreign-born men. As a result, immigrant men's economic assimilation is reversed in later life. I find evidence that this phenomenon is driven mainly by immigrants' lower lifetime earnings and cumulative exposure to worse job benefits. Given that the foreign-born elderly population in the United States is projected to quadruple by 2050, findings from this paper have important implications for long-term policy planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classic models of urban inequality acknowledge the importance of politics for resource distribution and service provision. Yet, contemporary studies of spatial inequality rarely measure politics directly. In this paper, we introduce political dynasties as a way of integrating political economy approaches with ecological theory to better understand the political construction of urban spatial inequality. To do so, we examine the case of political dynasties within the Chicago city council. We show that, from 2011 to 2018, blocks in dynastic wards saw fewer homicides, assaults, robberies, and thefts relative to those in non-dynastic wards. We then leverage the 2015 ward redistricting to provide evidence that dynastic effects play some role in producing these outcomes: blocks annexed into dynastic wards experienced a decline in assaults and robberies and an increase in pothole coverings. While dynastic politicians improve outcomes for blocks they annex, they also withdraw power from those they displace; and displaced blocks had relatively higher levels of crime than annexed blocks in 2015. Taken together, our findings provide evidence that dynastic politicians are contributing to spatial inequalities within Chicago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether immigrants and their descendants are catching up socioeconomically with the rest of society is a fundamental question in the study of immigrant assimilation. In this paper, we examine the progress that Hispanic immigrant men make catching up with the earnings of later-generation Whites across generations. We rely on data from multiple years of the Current Population Survey linked with individuals' tax earnings. This unique dataset allows us to overcome some important limitations of previous studies that employ a synthetic generation approach in which individuals born approximately one generation earlier are used as proxies for actual parents. Our matching strategy also enables us to identify the exact third generation and evaluate the contribution of ethnic attrition to estimates of intergenerational mobility. Second-generation Hispanic men are found to experience lower mobility than later-generation Whites for most values of parental earnings. However, their lower mobility can be explained by their immigrant parents' lower education levels. In contrast, third-generation Hispanic men experience lower mobility even after accounting for parental education and ethnic attrition. This finding is consistent with a stalling or reversal in the socioeconomic progress of Hispanics beyond the second generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how social capital and property regulations shape cultural producers' ability to own copyrights for the products they create. Because individual producers lack the resources required to develop and distribute their creations, they partner with large firms who demand the copyrights for products they invest in. I argue two types of social capital—status and partner substitutability—enable producers to own their creations by increasing their bargaining power over the firms they partner with. Moreover, I propose that different types of property regulations condition whether status or partner substitutability have a stronger role in producers' ownership outcomes. Analyzing all shows made for American television from 1956 to 1996, I show that increases in showrunners' status and number of broadcasters they collaborated with increased the probability they owned shows they produced. However, the effects of these social capitals were contingent on the property regulations showrunners operated under. These findings advance our understanding of the allocation of copyrights, the power dynamics between creators and firms, and the effects of social capital in cultural industries. They didn't have to pay me because I signed the contract. But is that right? I found out that these people were streaming my work, and they never had to ask me...They stole that from me. They just took it! (Dave Chappelle, The Unforgiven, 2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elites often use merit to explain, justify, and make sense of their advantaged positions. But what exactly do they mean by this? In this paper, we draw on 71 interviews with elites in Denmark and the UK to compare self-justifications of meritocratic legitimacy. Our results indicate that while elites in both countries are united by a common concern to frame their merits as spontaneously recognized by others (rather than strategically promoted by themselves), the package of attributes they foreground vary significantly. In the UK, elites tend to be "talent meritocrats" who foreground their unique capacity for ideational creativity or risk taking, innately good judgment, and "natural" aptitude, intelligence, or academic ability. In contrast, in Denmark, elites are more likely to be "hard work meritocrats" who emphasize their unusual work ethic, extensive experience (as a signal of accumulated hard work), and contributions outside of work, particularly in civil society. We tentatively argue that one explanation for this cross-national variation is the role that different channels of elite recruitment play in amplifying legitimate notions of merit. In the UK, for example, elite private schools act to nurture ideas of exceptionalism and natural talent, whereas in Denmark elite employers socialize the connection between hard work and success. These findings suggest that nationally specific understandings of merit can have quite different implications for the legitimation of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper investigates whether restrictive immigration policy affects earnings among White, African-American, and Latinx US citizens. Incorporating sociological theories of race that point to state surveillance of Black and Latinx bodies as a linchpin of racial inequality, we ask: Do immigration policies that expand the reach of law enforcement spill over to lower or to raise earnings of employed US citizens? If so, are the effects of these policies greater for Latinx and African-American citizens compared to their White counterparts? Are the effects of these policies stronger among Latinx and African-American men—who are more directly targeted by surveillance policing as a function of their gender—than for co-ethnic women? To investigate these questions, we combine two nationally representative longitudinal datasets—the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We find that immigration policies that expand the reach of law enforcement raise wages among native-born Whites. However, we also find that state policies enhancing immigration law enforcement decrease wages among Latinx and African-American citizens compared to Whites. We find no gender/race interactions influencing spillover effects of immigration policy on earnings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on migrant identity increasingly shows that migrants can—and often do—construct multifaceted identities. Yet, questions around migrant identity formation remain contested in France, given a strongly assimilationist policy context that (in theory) precludes multiple identification. This paper explores intergenerational patterns of migrant identification in France using a nationally representative sample of 1st-, 1.5th-, and 2nd-generation migrants in France from five diverse sending regions in the Trajectories and Origin Survey. We conduct a latent profile analysis to identify qualitatively different unobserved (or latent) categories of migrant identification based on observed responses to questions of identification and belonging. These analyses suggest there are five distinct "identificational orientations" among migrants: assimilated, active bicultural, othered bicultural, detached bicultural , and ethnic. While the assimilated and ethnic categories provide some support for a traditional assimilation framework, biculturalism is widely prevalent and multifaceted: We identify three distinct varieties of biculturalism (active, othered, and detached). We also provide evidence of segmentation in identificational assimilation by region of origin and conduct multivariate analyses that shed insight into the experiences that correlate with different identificational orientations. Our findings question the presumed threat of strong ethnic identification to France's national cohesion and offer starting points for future research on how complex identities are formed within strongly assimilationist receiving contexts like France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While evidence suggests a durable relationship between redlining and population health, we currently lack an empirical account of how this historical act of racialized violence produced contemporary inequities. In this paper, we use a mediation framework to evaluate how redlining grades influenced later life expectancy and the degree to which contemporary racial disparities in life expectancy between Black working-class neighborhoods and White professional-class neighborhoods can be explained by past Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) mapping. Life expectancy gaps between differently graded tracts are driven by economic isolation and disparate property valuation which developed within these areas in subsequent decades. Still, only a small percent of a total disparity between contemporary Black and White neighborhoods is explained by HOLC grades. We discuss the role of HOLC maps in analyses of structural racism and health, positioning them as only one feature of a larger public–private project conflating race with financial risk. Policy implications include not only targeting resources to formerly redlined neighborhoods but also the larger project of dismantling racist theories of value that are deeply embedded in the political economy of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive research investigates how immigration shapes natives' anti-immigrant sentiment. However, several areas require further scrutiny. This paper explores how processes of immigration affect anti-immigrant sentiment in a new immigration destination country—Japan—drawing on longitudinal data to examine these processes over time and explicitly testing the mechanisms of perceived threat and intergroup contact posited to underpin this relationship. Through this analysis, the paper aims to: examine how generalizable the immigrant share/immigration attitudes theoretical framework is to non-Western societies; refine our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning this relationship; and more robustly test its causal assumptions. To pursue these aims, the study draws on two sets of nationally representative Japanese data, designed to generate complementary insights, including: four waves of longitudinal panel data (2008–2014) and a unique cross-sectional dataset containing measures of perceived threat and contact. Applying multilevel and fixed-effects panel data approaches, the findings demonstrate that as immigration increases in Japanese prefectures and municipalities, residents become increasingly averse toward immigration (although there is some evidence of non-linearity at the municipality level, with sentiment improving again in high immigrant share environments). This overall relationship appears largely driven by two competing processes. In higher immigrant share environments, perceived threat is higher, increasing anti-immigrant sentiment. However, concurrently, intergroup contact also increases in these environments, reducing anti-immigrant sentiment. Therefore, despite the overall negative relationship (driven primarily by perceived threat), rising contact exerts a countervailing positive effect as immigration increases. Taken together, this research demonstrates that theories of attitudinal-change with higher immigration, developed within Western-contexts, also appear salient for newer destination, non-Western societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines why young women in rural Ethiopia decide to migrate as domestic workers to the Middle East. Based on survey data and 84 in-depth interviews, it explores the forces shaping young women's aspirations and capabilities to migrate, challenging the dominant narratives of trafficking, deception, and victimization that surround this migration corridor. It finds, first, that migration to the Middle East is one migration trajectory embedded within a broader urban transition occurring across Ethiopia. For rural women, labor emigration is often a long-distance, short-term strategy to access the capital needed to realize a long-term, short-distance move to town. Second, the aspiration to migrate emerges at a particular moment in the life course, as young women transition from adolescence into adulthood and when local opportunities do not provide promising pathways to achieve their life aspirations. This paper shows why labor emigration can simultaneously be a reasonable, capabilities-enhancing choice for young women and a response to a critical lack of capabilities in other domains of their lives. Finally, through applying an aspiration–capability framework, this paper advances a theoretical approach that avoids the common binary between "forced" and "voluntary" migration and thus contributes to advancing research on other forms of precarious migration occurring under highly constrained conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nothing puzzles sociologists of religion more than the reasons and the patterns behind religious change. In the literature on secularization processes, it is broadly accepted that ongoing modernization has undermined many of the pillars of institutional religions, leading to widespread religious decline. While a considerable body of research investigates the "why(s)" of this decline, the main focus of this paper is on the "how." Drawing on CARPE, a harmonized dataset concerning church attendance with almost 2 million observations spanning over 40 years in 39 European countries, this article disentangles the contributions of period change and cohort replacement to the general religious decline. It shows that this decline reflects a real population dynamic based on generational replacement. It is not historical events or developments affecting everyone that undermine religion: new and less religious cohorts are replacing old and more religious ones. Like many other population dynamics, this process is described by an S-shaped curve and applies—with different speeds and levels—to almost all the European countries considered herein. These findings suggest that the effects of the processes of modernization on the mechanisms of religious socialization should be scrutinized more carefully when studying the reasons behind religious decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses an intersectional framework to account for the degree to which race, when intersecting gender, relates to teachers' evaluations of US elementary school children over time. Drawing on longitudinal data from the 2011 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten cohort, we employ growth curve modeling to study descriptive trends in teacher perceptions of student behavior from kindergarten through fifth grade. We find that educators' perceptions of White, Asian American, and Latinx girls increase over time, while their perceptions of Black girls remain flat. Meanwhile, a different longitudinal trend emerges among boys. Although teachers' views of Black boys decrease over time, their views of other boys increase to the levels of Black girls, or higher, by the end of fifth grade. This analysis reveals how teachers' perceptions coalesce into an emerging hierarchy that—by the end of fifth grade—most sharply contrasts the behavior of Asian American girls and Black boys. Our intersectional approach and the theoretical framework informing it underscore the limits to considering how educators distinguish students by gender or race alone. Together, gender and race more fully account for differences in how educators perceive student behavior over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do some large-scale adverse events receive major media coverage and become crises for public actors while others are treated as routine events? This article reinvestigates this question based on a case study of the media treatment in France of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents. Drawing on an original set of media data and an ethnographic study, the article shows how both accidents were subject to forms of opacity that limit their effects on nuclear institutions: Chernobyl has been treated through secrecy that leads to contestation of nuclear institutions, whereas Fukushima has been characterized by "public containment," relying on extensive publication but low-priority and uncontroversial narratives that do not reflect the stakes of a given policy field. This paper explains the role of Fukushima in France through institutional transformations that public actors engaged in following Chernobyl to reestablish the credibility of public information sources and to monitor public debates over nuclear accidents by developing "hybrid" spaces, located at the interface of organizational frontstages and backstages. This case shows how responding to transparency demands may sometimes create new forms of opacity by reducing the epistemic quality of public debates while containing political crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does conspiracist thinking become appealing to its adherents, and with what political consequences? Drawing on fifty in-depth interviews with gun sellers from April 2020 to August 2020, this paper examines conspiracist thinking among US conservatives. We present a sociological account that follows historian Richard Hofstadter's early account in theorizing conspiracist thinking as a "style" of politics on the Right. Turning to the sociology of culture and political sociology, we examine conspiracist thinking as a tool of political sense-making that becomes particularly appealing during "unsettled" insecurity. We focus on conservative adherents to conspiracist thinking, examining how conspiracist thinking is mobilized to assert feelings of control and certainty in ways that reinforce allegiance to conservative values and repudiation of partisan opponents. Specifically, we theorize conspiracist thinking as an everyday practice of meaning-making (an epistemological practice) which responds to conditions of unsettled insecurity that reflects existing conservative "modes of thought" (e.g. anti-elitist skepticism) and also reinforces conservative sentiments through two mechanisms: epistemological individualism and epistemological othering. Extending existing accounts of conspiracism, our analysis illuminates how conspiracist thinking—as an active, and self-reinforcing, struggle for epistemological control amid contexts of information scarcity and uncertainty—has come to shape American politics from the bottom up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School segregation has been a topic of significant sociological research in the United States. Less attention has been devoted to understanding the relationship between school district inequalities and secession, a political tool that forms new boundaries after a formal withdrawal from an existing school district. This paper analyzes the school district secession attempts that have occurred since the year 2000 using national data and builds upon qualitative research and case studies focused on a single region or metropolitan area. Drawing on social closure theory, I explore the community characteristics associated with secession attempts. To do so, I create a measure of social imbalance that leverages the geographic variation between places attempting a secession and the school districts they are nested within. Results indicate that the percentage of residents with a college degree is among the strongest predictors of secession attempts, highlighting the salience of educational attainment at the population-level for selecting into the use of this political tool. Results also indicate that school districts successfully created through secession cleave onto racial and economic divides for both the residential and student populations, driven by secessions located in the South. School district secession processes elucidate the many pathways by which school segregation is produced and perpetuated, including micro-level school and neighborhood selection decisions, jurisdictional restructuring of district boundaries, and the national and state-level legal landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has documented an association between adolescents' romantic experiences and poor emotional health. However, lack of intensive longitudinal measurement and an emphasis on negative affect have limited understanding about the extent to which adolescent relationship quality influences the emotional health of adolescents in partnerships, including the potential benefits of high-quality partnerships. Previous research has also been limited in its ability to account for factors that select adolescents into lower or higher quality partnerships. Using biweekly intensive longitudinal data from the mDiary Study of Adolescent Relationships linked to six waves of birth cohort data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this paper uses multilevel mixed-effects models to address three questions: (1) How are changes in partnership quality (defined as validation, frequency of disagreements, and global quality) associated with changes in both positive and negative affect; (2) Do observed associations persist net of factors that potentially select adolescents into lower or higher quality partnerships (e.g. childhood family experiences); and (3) Do associations between partnership quality and affect differ by gender? Results show that higher quality partnerships are associated with both decreases in negative affect and increases in positive affect. There were no significant gender differences on average. The study's findings highlight the importance of partnership quality as a key source of temporal variation in adolescents' emotional states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is currently a mismatch between the theoretical expectations of peer effects held by many scholars and the quantitative empirical literature. This paper contributes to the understanding of peer effects by highlighting the oft-overlooked conceptual distinction between social influences and a well-defined causal effect; peers may influence one another via several potentially contradicting mechanisms that result in small overall causal peer effects on educational outcomes. We exploit the idiosyncratic variation in gender composition across cohorts within schools to study offsetting mechanisms. Using population-wide Norwegian register and survey data, we find two distinct ways in which the share of girls in lower secondary schools (grades 8–10) affects academic outcomes. First, more girl peers improve the learning environment at school. Simultaneously, however, more girl peers reduce the students' motivation for schoolwork. Such results suggest that peer effects stem from a complex process where various mechanisms are at odds with one another, and where the influence of peers on academic outcomes is a composite of different mechanisms. Overall, we find that more girl peers lower students' school grades and reduce students' likelihood of attending an academic track in upper secondary school (which qualifies for higher education). Supplementary analyses suggest that the achievement level of girls is the main reason for the gender peer effects found in our study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil society organizations (CSOs) are a cornerstone of democracy in Europe. Nonetheless, "civil society" and "political society" should not be equated as membership-based organizations are not necessarily politically engaged. This paper theorizes and empirically examines which membership-based CSOs engage in interest representation through sustained advocacy activity. We propose an incentive-theoretical framework on CSO investments in advocacy activities—a collective, non-exclusive incentive from which also non-members can profit—by organizations fundamentally dependent on member support. Theorizing how CSOs' own structural characteristics, resource dependencies, and government demand for CSO input affect how CSOs reconcile selective and collective incentive provision, we test our hypotheses using new data from four recent surveys conducted in four European democracies. In line with our framework, CSOs organizing individual citizens rather than corporate actors and those pursuing member interests are less likely to engage in advocacy, while CSO professionalization and state funding access enhance CSOs' propensities to do so. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the former structural CSO characteristics are similarly relevant for CSO advocacy across distinct country settings, while the role of resource variables is mediated by institutional context revealing an important source of inequality in democratic interest representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relative importance of racial and class inequality in incarceration in the United States has recently become the subject of much debate. In this paper, we seek to give this debate a stronger empirical foundation. First, we update previous research on racial and class inequality in people's likelihood of being imprisoned. Then, we examine racial and class inequality in people's risk of having a family member imprisoned or living in a high-imprisonment neighborhood. We find that racial inequality in prison admissions has fallen in the twenty-first century, while class inequality has surged. However, in recent years, Black people with high levels of education and income were more likely than white people with low levels of education and income to experience the imprisonment of a family member or to live in a neighborhood with a high imprisonment rate. These seemingly contradictory conclusions can be reconciled by the fact that enduring structures of racial domination have made class boundaries among Black people more permeable than they are among white people. Imprisonment in the United States is increasingly reserved for the poor. But because Black Americans are disproportionately connected to the poor through their families and neighborhoods, racial inequality exceeds class inequality in people's indirect experiences with imprisonment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing academic interest in examining how terrorist attacks shape the majority's attitudes towards minority groups. Yet, little is known of how these minority groups react to the backlash such events provoke. This paper leverages the exogenous occurrence of a series of terrorist attacks during the fieldwork period of two surveys to estimate how such events affect the sentiment of both citizens and asylum seekers in Germany. Results of the natural experiment reveal that the 2016 terror attacks in Nice, Würzburg, and Ansbach substantially increased anti-refugee sentiment among German respondents. In line with this increase in hostility, refugees experienced more discrimination, felt less welcome in Germany, and suffered clinically relevant declines in mental health in the aftermath of the attacks. These results provide a more holistic understanding of how terrorism corrodes intergroup relations and how it affects those that are blamed for the events and thus suffer the brunt of the backlash following their occurrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade union institutions are historically and comparatively weak in the United States, and union membership has been in steady decline over several decades. Scholars thus question the contemporary relevance of organized labor to social policy. Yet, there is considerable state-level variation in social policy and union institutional strength that remains underexamined. Focusing on variability across US states, this paper uses mixed-methods analysis to examine relationships between organized labor and parental and family leave legislation under varying political conditions. Event history analysis of state-level leave policy adoption from 1983 to 2016 shows that union institutional strength, particularly in the public sector, is positively associated with the timing of leave policy adoption. These findings are robust to the inclusion of other factors, including Democratic control of state houses, which is also shown to facilitate leave policy adoption. Comparative case studies support event history findings and illustrate how state house partisanship informs the level of government that leave advocates target for policy change. The paper concludes by suggesting further attention to subnational policies and investigation into the social movement practice of target-shifting and its effects. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates the operation of power resources at the subnational level within a liberal market national context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 100th anniversary of Social Forces provides a rich opportunity to reflect on the history of the journal and changes to sociology as a whole. Using a series of formal text-analytic methods, we describe the shifting intellectual landscape of Social Forces publications. We uncover a wide diversity of topics that shift over time reflecting the breadth of interests engaging sociologists as Social Forces grew into one of the discipline's premier journals. In addition to shifts in content, we examine changes in sociological work during this century. We find that articles have generally become more interdisciplinary, while being produced by larger, more gender inclusive and globalized teams. We examine both the most cited papers in Social Forces as well as factors associated with greater recognition. The overall story implied by these explorations suggests a vibrant journal that has shaped the way that sociology has worked over the last 100 years. [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]

This paper examines the development of the impact of family background on young people's political engagement during adolescence and early adulthood in order to test a number of hypotheses derived from the impressionable years and family socialization perspectives. The study analyses data of the British Household Panel Study and Understanding Society to assess these hypotheses. Political interest and voting intentions are used as outcomes of political engagement. The study finds parental education to have no effect on initial levels of these outcomes at age 11 but to be positively related to the change in these outcomes between ages 11 and 15. This indicates that the effect of parental education becomes stronger over time and that social disparities in political engagement are widening significantly during early adolescence. In contrast, parental political engagement is positively related to initial levels of voting intentions at age 11 but not related to the change in voting intentions between ages 11 and 15, which supports the hypothesis drawn from the family socialization perspective. Neither parental education nor parental political engagement are related to post-16 changes in political engagement. These results point to early adolescence as a crucial period for the manifestation of social inequalities in political engagement. They provisionally suggest that the influence of parental education runs through educational conditions in lower secondary and that these conditions could play an important role in amplifying the said inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is irrational risk-avoiding behavior related to news media's heightened attention for the negative and exceptional? Based on the theoretical approaches of mediatization and cultivation, it is hypothesized how news media can present an overly negative and biased reality that can have a severe impact on society. Focusing on the case of travel accidents, we argue that a disproportional increase in news attention for low-probability high-consequence aviation accidents can distort audiences' risk perceptions such that driving is inaccurately perceived as a safer transportation alternative to flying, with potentially harmful consequences. This study accordingly documents results from time-series analyses (1996–2017) on US media attention for aviation and road accidents related to real-world data on travel behavior and fatal accidents. The over-time patterns expose how news media follow their own mediatized logic and reality: Negative incidents—i.e. both aviation and road accidents—become more prominent in the news over time, rather than accurately reflecting real-world trends. Next, since air travel is statistically the safest transportation mode, disproportionate attention for aviation accidents is argued to especially create a problematic distorted worldview among audiences. Accordingly, findings show how more media attention for aviation accidents is related to relatively more road traffic and more fatal road accidents in the subsequent months. We conclude that the media's systematic overrepresentation of rare aviation accidents can overshadow the more substantial risk of (long-distance) driving. This paper illustrates how a distorted media reality can potentially result in severe consequences in light of audiences' ill-informed fear perceptions and irrational risk-avoiding behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Routine-biased technological change has emerged as the dominant explanation for the differential earnings growth of occupations at greater risk of automation, such as machine operators or office clerks, relative to less routine occupations. In contrast, this paper finds that the declining earnings returns to an occupation's routine task intensity (RTI) can largely be attributed to the decline of organized labor. Using individual-level data on 3.3 million employed adults across the United States from 1983 to 2017, this paper finds that organized labor has two countervailing effects on occupations at greater risk of automation. First, higher union coverage within a state and industry inhibits the decline in earnings returns to an occupation's RTI. Second, higher union coverage hastens the decline in employment shares of occupations with higher RTI. The result is that occupations at greater risk of automation experience more favorable earnings growth where unions are more resilient, but at the cost of accelerated declines in their employment shares. Counterfactual analyses demonstrate that if union coverage in the United States had remained stable at 1983 levels, the earnings returns to an occupation's RTI might not have declined from 1983 to 2017, and the observed pattern of occupational earnings polarization in the 1990s might not have occurred. However, the mean RTI of occupations might have declined by an additional 21 percent from 1983 to 2017 relative to the observed decline. The findings suggest that the social consequences of automation are conditional on the strength of organized labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Americans facing large health-related expenses have increasingly turned to online crowdsourced funding for support, initiating 250,000 medical fundraisers on GoFundMe in 2018. Recent research indicates that these fundraisers yield inequitable outcomes, with White crowdfunding beneficiaries receiving higher levels of support than non-White beneficiaries. Researchers fear that racialized impressions of deservingness may be a driver of unequal returns in crowdfunding. However, rather than being a direct effect of interpersonal racism, differences in returns may be an indirect effect of the systemic racism that causes the social networks of Black and Hispanic Americans to have lower access to financial capital. This paper is the first to focus on how unequal access to monetary capital in networks of potential crowdfunding donors drives unequal returns for beneficiaries. I analyze a geographically stratified sample of 2,618 GoFundMe campaigns coded for perceived race and ethnicity of the beneficiary. I estimate donor financial capacity for each campaign based on the geography of Facebook friend networks and the most likely racial and ethnic makeup of the donor pool, based on donor surnames. I show that variations in the estimated income of potential donors can account for much of the deficit in returns. Thus, even in the absence of interpersonal discrimination, crowdfunding is unlikely to yield equitable outcomes given the current distribution of financial resources in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although educational stratification research finds that educational tracking differentiates the development of cognitive skills and academic achievement, little is known about its consequences for noncognitive traits. This paper presents a framework for understanding how track placement affects personality traits and empirically tests its implications using longitudinal survey data from Denmark. I find that enrollment in the vocational track in upper secondary education on average increases conscientiousness by one third of a standard deviation more than enrollment in the academic track does. No other personality traits are affected by track placement. Additional analyses show that the influence of vocational education and training on conscientiousness is greater among students taking on an apprenticeship and learning a skilled trade, suggesting that such training closes the between-track gap in conscientiousness by fostering a skilled worker identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the comparative literature on divorce by theorizing how international institutions and norms influence societal divorce rates. Drawing on developmental idealism and world society theory, the paper argues that global institutions legitimize cultural principles such as individualism, human rights, and gender equality, which reshape "modern" understandings of marriage and family relations. Formal international institutions and treaties do not explicitly proclaim or codify the right to divorce, but we suggest that new norms regarding divorce emerge from the "penumbras" of world culture and diffuse globally. Panel regression models covering 84 countries between 1970 and 2008 find a strong association between global cultural influence and divorce rates, controlling for other factors. Results highlight the effects of world society on the private lives of individuals, and suggest that world society affects a wider set of outcomes than the conventional literature would predict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent institutional and cultural changes have allowed individuals to gradually (but persistently) follow more complex, less uniform, and less predictable work and family patterns than the patterns often assumed to be the norm in Western settings. However, we identify important gaps in this literature: (i) a persistent focus on high-income countries in Western Europe and North America, (ii) an emphasis on narrowed periods of adulthood, and (iii) a disregard for coresidential histories when analyzing the family domain. In this paper, we aim to address these shortcomings in two ways. First, we identify lifetime employment and coresidential trajectories of individuals living currently in Santiago, Chile, born between 1944 and 1954—a cohort that faced several political, economic, and cultural changes across their lives. Second, we explore how gender and socioeconomic disadvantages are associated with individuals' life trajectories. We conduct a multichannel sequence analysis of a comprehensive life history dataset and find that about a quarter of the sample (27.2%) follows a modal pattern of continuous formal full-time employment and coresidence with a partner and children. The remaining proportion of individuals follow more complex, unstable, and interrupted patterns, which vary in their levels of work attachment, work informality, solo parenthood, and intergenerational households. Our findings question the idea that socially advantaged individuals opt for more complex life courses and instead confirm the association between socially disadvantaged individuals, particularly women and those lower educated, and complex trajectories. Rather than deliberate individualistic choices, life course instability appears as an additional layer of social disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hydrocarbon pipelines have emerged as a highly contentious political issue in recent years. In this paper, I conduct spatial regression analyses at national and regional scales to determine whether the locations of hydrocarbon pipelines constitute a systemic environmental justice issue throughout the contiguous US transmission pipeline system. National-level analyses show that counties with higher percentages of non-White residents are associated with more kilometers of hydrocarbon pipeline, whereas counties with a higher percentage of residents with a four-year college degree are associated with fewer kilometers of hydrocarbon pipeline. Regional analyses reveal further complexity, showing only degrees of consistency with national-level results. Situating these results within the emergent literature on planetary urbanization, I develop a multiscalar environmental justice framework that I call extended spaces of environmental injustice. Extended spaces of environmental injustice describe the places through which infrastructures of extended urbanization, which are built across vast geographical distances and operate to meet the material needs of urban society, materialize as spatially variegated environmental justice issues at the local scale. I conclude by arguing that the extended spaces of environmental injustice framework can open new pathways for research related to environmental justice and scale, both in analyzing the geography of existing infrastructures of extended urbanization and the construction of future infrastructure as efforts to decarbonize the economy manifest spatially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 5 years, the "Latinx" label has become increasingly popular within academia, politics, and social media. Yet, little is known about who has adopted the term at this relatively early stage and how it might be interpreted. Drawing on a unique data set of US-born Californians, as well as Latina/o/x Studies insight, this paper provides the first academic survey results on "Latinx" identification. We find that close to 25 percent of respondents identify with the term regularly, and that its early adoption varies across groups. Specifically, political ideology, especially progressive politics, is strongly correlated with use of the label. We also find that both immigrant generation and birth cohort matter considerably, with second generation immigrants and people born in Generation Z (since 1995) most likely to identify with the term. Finally, our findings show that "Latinx" is largely understood as complementary to, not mutually exclusive of, other panethnic labels like "Hispanic" and "Latino." Taken together, our results suggest that generational politics matter for understanding early label diffusion and that Latinos adopt a variety of panethnic labels that they likely use in different contexts. We discuss these findings in terms of our broader understanding of Latinidad, racialization, and the symbolic power of ethnoracial labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does anti-state, violent rioting take place in advanced democracies? The paper investigates the role of the urban environment in shaping grievances expressed and mobilization/counter-mobilization processes observed during a riotous episode. In particular, I look at large social-housing estates as a propitious urban setting for the eruption and sustenance of anti-state violence. I identify three mechanisms (stigma amplification and inversion, failure of state intervention in the form of everyday administration and emergency policing, and advantages for network activation and resource mobilization among potential rioters) that complement standard explanations of rioting based on socioeconomic and ethno-cultural grievances. I test the theoretical model using a controlled case study of two neighboring suburbs in the North of Paris, with similar socioeconomic, demographic, and political characteristics but different violent outcomes in the 2005 nation-wide wave of French riots. The paper traces the source of local variation to the exogenous presence of large, concentrated social-housing estates in one, but not the other. The analysis here treats anti-state rioting as a form of urban protest and looks at state-society divisions rooted in urban geography and policy that have been overlooked in conventional scholarship on minority mobilization in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes that CEO dismissal is a form of penalty that CEOs incur for their record of deviation from historically prevailing norms of appropriate behavior during performance downturns. To verify this argument, I examine CEO dismissal and post-dismissal strategic change in large U.S. companies between 1984 and 2007, when the field in which these firms were embedded was characterized by the prominence of the norms of corporate restructuring for shareholders. My findings are three-fold. First, the effect of performance declines on CEO dismissal was intensified by the extent to which CEOs held a record of deviation from the norms of restructuring—i.e. that of increasing assets, employees, and unrelated diversification. Second, new CEOs were more inclined to engage in restructuring when they took office following the dismissal of predecessors with a record of deviation. Finally, those patterns of CEO dismissal and post-dismissal restructuring became more evident over time as the norms developed. Meanwhile, the findings did not apply prior to the shareholder value era. Consequently, this paper suggests that institutional norms act as interpretive frameworks that enable a board of directors to make sense of performance problems and evaluate managerial competence to resolve those problems. Implications for the literatures on institutional theory and upper echelon research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complementing the existing partisanship and income distribution literature that focuses on the earnings of all employees, this paper examines the effect of left government partisanship on top managers. Drawing on firm-level top executive compensation data across thirteen advanced industrialized countries, the paper shows that left government partisanship principally leads to lower CEO compensation, either through laws that enhance workers' collective bargaining power vis-à-vis management or laws that allow shareholders to cast proxy votes on executive compensation (i.e. say-on-pay laws). Furthermore, I show that left government partisanship reduces CEO pay more heavily in those firms that more strongly favor labor's competing stakeholders. In particular, left partisanship reduces executive compensation more heavily in firms that set aside more revenue for shareholders, managers, or creditors, that is, firms with higher asset return, stock return, or debt. These findings highlight how the macro-politics of rising top income inequality at the national level interacts with the micro-distributive conflicts at the firm level. In particular, financialization, such as the rise of the shareholder value revolution, may accentuate the impact of partisan politics against top income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the gender promotion gap in a particular highly skilled profession, that of physicians. The following analyses are based on a dataset of more than a thousand doctors working in Italy, a country in which hospitals play a central role in the national health care system. Given a three-step career ladder—first level, vice, and head—this research finds that women are 8% less likely than men to be promoted from the first level to vice, whereas no significant disadvantage is found in the promotion from vice to head. This suggests that the vertical segregation is due more to a sticky floors mechanism than to a glass ceiling effect. Moreover, no motherhood penalty occurs. Private organizations appear to be more gender equal than public ones and similar, albeit weaker, findings come from the analysis of the specialties, cautiously suggesting that the male-dominated area of surgery is more gender equal than the female-dominated area of medicine. These findings point out that women in highly skilled professions may encounter fewer obstacles to promotion than in the general labor market. Furthermore, they may encounter fewer obstacles within the most competitive organizations and specialty areas than across the profession in general. This is not, however, because of a greater number of opportunities, but because they represent a highly selected and career-oriented population. These results shed light on the costs of such achievement for women, both in terms of effort and in terms of equality among women themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of precarious work in recent decades has motivated a large body of research on its implications for health. While considerable work has focused on whether precarious work undermines health, much less is known about why it matters. To fill this gap, this paper offers and tests a conceptual model whereby the effects of precarious work on health are mediated by social marginality, specifically reduced self-efficacy, weaker social integration, and lower social capital. All three mechanisms are understood as both social consequences of precarious work and important determinants of health. Empirically, we use data from the European Social Survey and investigate (1) conditional direct effects of precarious work on self-rated health and (2) extent of mediation via the three mechanisms. Furthermore, we assess the generalizability of the model across five welfare state regimes that prior work has deemed to be important moderators of the health–precarious work relationship. Results indicate precarious work has significant conditional direct effects and indirect effects through all three mediators that significantly reduce effect of precarious work on health. This is robust in the general sample and for four of five welfare state regimes. These findings highlight a previously unexplored vector connecting precarious work to health and indicate that the effects of precarious work on perceptions of self and social relations is a key link to poorer health. The study also expands conceptualization of the broad role of socioeconomic status for health inequalities and furthers understanding of the mechanisms at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how social capital is divided across classes in Chile, one of the most unequal countries in the world. We analyse the extent to which upper-, middle-, and lower class individuals congregate in social networks with similar others, while following Bourdieu and expecting that in particular the networks of the higher social strata are segregated in terms of social capital. We test our argument with large-scale, representative survey data for the Chilean urban population aged 18–75 years (n  = 2,517) and build an integrated indicator of people's social class that combines measures of education, occupational class, and household income. Our regression analyses show that upper-class individuals have larger networks and access to more varied and prestigious social resources than their middle- and lower class counterparts. Interestingly, however, we found a U-shaped relationship between social class and class homogeneity, indicating that network segregation is high at the top as well as at the bottom of the class-based social strata. In contrast, the classes in the middle have more heterogeneous class networks, possibly forming an important bridge between the "edges" of the class structure. These findings demonstrate that whereas social and economic capital cumulates in higher classes, the lower classes are socially deprived next to their economic disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior inequality literature has mainly focused on the period trends of inequality. This paper advances this literature by adopting a cohort approach to examine the age and cohort patterns of wage inequality. Employing a trajectory-based analytic framework to analyze almost 50 years of longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I found that the life course patterns of inequality among American men have shifted across cohorts on both aggregate level and microlevel. The cumulative wage advantage associated with higher educational attainment has become more important across cohorts. Wage volatility has increased from earlier to later cohorts and the trend varies by age. The increase in volatility occurred first among mid-career workers and then among early-career workers. Additional analysis suggests that these cohort shifts differ by educational and occupational groups. The findings highlight the value of a cohort and life course approach for studying the process of social stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, qualitative research from across sub-Saharan Africa has shown how young men are often unable to marry because they lack wealth and a stable livelihood. With survey data, researchers have begun to study how men's economic circumstances are related to when they marry in the continent's capitals and larger urban centers. However, our understanding of these dynamics outside of large cities remains limited. Drawing on longitudinal survey data, this paper examines how men's economic standing, both at the individual and household level, relates to their marriage timing in rural and semi-urban communities in the Salima district of Malawi. The findings show that men who have higher earnings, work in agriculture, and come from a household that sold cash crops were more likely to marry. In contrast, students as well as men from households owning a large amount of land were substantially less likely to marry. Additionally, men living in the semi-urban communities were around half as likely to marry as their rural counterparts. This negative association is largely explained by the greater proportion of men who are students in towns and trading centers and also the relatively less agricultural nature of these communities. These findings show the value of considering both individual and family characteristics in studies of marriage timing and also suggest that as sub-Saharan Africa urbanizes, the age of marriage for men will likely rise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research finds that unemployment leaves permanent "scars" on subjective well-being (SWB) that remain even after reemployment. However, this research systematically overweighs long-term unemployment, inaccurately measures employment transitions, often does not track individuals long enough to substantiate scarring, and does not always account for age-related changes in well-being. This paper uses event history calendars from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to track complete monthly employment histories of prime working age Americans over a 17-year period, and accounts for the temporal relationships between SWB, age, and employment transitions using a novel fixed-effects formulation. The results suggest that there is some variation in patterns of recovery by employment stability after job loss, but no significant differences were observed by the duration of unemployment spells. Within 2 years of reemployment, average SWB levels reverted toward baseline trajectories across all groups, showing no evidence of scarring. This study brings unemployment literature into better alignment with research on resilience and adaptation. The findings also highlight some limitations of the construct of SWB for assessing the long-term costs of unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categories that become taken-for-granted tend to acquire rule-like standing. That is, people begin to strongly expect certain behaviors from entities that have claimed affiliation with them, and these expectations tend to induce conformity. However, conformity does not always ensue, and we lack an explanation of why the effects of category taken-for-grantedness might diverge. In this paper, we propose that the effects of increasing category taken-for-grantedness hinge upon an organization's identity. We first argue that the relationship between organizational identity and the likelihood of conformity is U-shaped, with insiders and outsiders being more likely to conform relative to those with middling identities. We then propose that greater category taken-for-grantedness should reduce scrutiny for those whose identities mark them as more of insiders, subsequently making them less likely to conform. In contrast, outsiders become more likely to conform as taken-for-grantedness increases. We test our arguments in the empirical context of Islamic banking, using data on 118 Islamic banks worldwide between 2001 and 2014. We examine the likelihood that banks in the sector make what are known as zakat payments as a function of category taken-for-grantedness and the extent to which a bank's identity is Islamic. We discuss implications for the literatures on categories and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial discrimination has been a central driver of residential segregation for many decades, in the Seattle area as well as in the United States as a whole. In addition to redlining and restrictive housing covenants, housing advertisements included explicit racial language until 1968. Since then, housing patterns have remained racialized, despite overt forms of racial language and discrimination becoming less prevalent. In this paper, we use Structural Topic Models (STM) and qualitative analysis to investigate how contemporary rental listings from the Seattle-Tacoma Craigslist page differ in their description based on neighborhood racial composition. Results show that listings from White neighborhoods emphasize trust and connections to neighborhood history and culture, while listings from non-White neighborhoods offer more incentives and focus on transportation and development features, sundering these units from their surroundings. Without explicitly mentioning race, these listings display racialized neighborhood discourse that might impact neighborhood decision-making in ways that contribute to the perpetuation of housing segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do national high-stakes exams affect educational expansion across the world? High-stakes exams are conventionally viewed as systems of exclusion that constrain enrollments. In this paper, we situate exams within a broader historical and institutional context and argue that the constraining effect of exams on educational enrollments is a recent phenomenon. Exam systems diffused globally at a time when schooling was a limited enterprise, linked to just a few occupational roles. The later emergence of more inclusive visions of education, culminating in the Education for All (EFA) movement, propelled rapid global educational expansion. In this context, national high-stakes exam systems institutionalize earlier logics of selective education and consequently blunt the impact of more recent expansionary norms. Using panel regression models and a newly constructed dataset of 142 countries from 1960 to 2010, we show that high-stakes exams are associated with lower enrollments. However, this association is strongest in recent years, and exams interact negatively with measures of international pro-educational norms and pressures on nation-states. These findings are consistent with our historical/institutional argument: Exams constrain enrollments in recent years, in part by rendering nations less responsive to global expansionary pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, scholars of world cultural diffusion have begun to examine the structure of the world society itself, finding evidence of regionalization within the network of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). There is little research, however, on how the structure of world society shapes processes of transnational diffusion. In this paper, I propose that the regionalization of world society, measured through INGO membership composition, structures the transnational diffusion of cultural norms like LGBT associations. Analyzing an original, comprehensive dataset of 3,141 domestic, voluntary LGBT associations founded between 1979 and 2009, I find that countries embedded in anti-LGBT regions are more resistant to the diffusion of domestic LGBT associations. I further find that the negative effect of embeddedness in anti-LGBT regions on domestic LGBT association founding is weakened by dependence on Western foreign aid. The findings highlight the importance of examining the composition of INGOs as well as attending to the role of regional culture in studies of transnational diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the 2013–2015 NSFG, a representative US-based dataset of individuals 15–44, to explore predictors of straight identification among all women and men and among subsets with substantial same-sex activity and/or attraction. After controlling for attractions and sexual practices, homophobia predicted straight identification in all groups. Among both groups of women, one femininity attitude and motherhood also predicted straight identification. One attitude reflecting alignment with normative masculinity significantly predicted straight identification among men with substantial same-sex activity and/or attraction. This paper also uses two waves of Add Health, a representative survey of young adults, to examine change to sexual identity over six years. Results show that among individuals who changed sexual identities between waves, heightened religiosity and political conservatism across waves were associated with increased odds of changing to a straight identity for women, but not for men. This suggests but does not prove a directional association between attitudes and identification for some individuals. Latent class analyses also found distinct groups of straight-identified men and women with substantial same-sex activity and/or attraction, indicating that it is a heterogeneous population in terms of attitudes, including homophobia. This suggests that straight identification is due partly to embeddedness in straight culture and enjoyment of straight privilege, not simply homophobia. While impossible to determine causality, the results show that straight identification is strongly related to non-sexual social factors, including religiosity and attitudes about sexuality and gender, in addition to attractions and sexual practices. The results also suggest that homophobia is related to identity formation for women, as well as men, but that there is substantial within-group variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ordinary individuals are increasingly charged with making investment decisions not only for themselves but also for close others. A child's college savings account and a spouse's retirement savings are instances where investing has become unmistakably relational. In this paper, we posit a theory of relational investing that extends Zelizer's relational perspective from the domain of transactions to that of financial risk-taking. Through two original survey experiments, we demonstrate that (1) individuals are less risky with dollars earmarked for others, (2) risk tolerance varies as a function of for whom the dollars are earmarked, and (3) labeling accounts for culturally significant life-stage events (such as retirement or college) also shapes risk tolerance. Because allocation decisions determine financial returns achieved by portfolios invested in the market, our framework and findings have important implications for understanding potential drivers of wealth inequality as well as for the study of culture and economic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do educational systems prepare workers for the labor market? Stratification research has often made a distinction between two ideal-types: "qualificational spaces," exemplified by Germany with a focus on vocational education, and "organizational spaces," exemplified by France with a focus on general education. However, most studies that investigated this distinction did so by focusing only on the size of the vocational sector, not on whether graduates with a vocational degree actually link strongly to the labor market. Moreover, they often studied male workers only, ignoring potential gender differences in how school-to-work linkages are established. In this paper, we map the change in education–occupation linkage in France and Germany between 1970 and 2010 using an approach that can distinguish between changes in rates and changes in the structure of school-to-work linkages. Surprisingly, we find that the German vocational system in 1970 was not, on average, substantially more efficient in allocating graduates to specific occupations than the French system. This finding is a major departure from earlier results, and it shows that the differences between 1970's France and Germany, on which the qualificational-organizational distinction is based, are smaller than previously assumed. Partly, this is due to the fact that the female labor force was omitted from earlier analyses. We thus show that ignoring the female workforce has consequences for today's conception of skill formation systems, particularly because a large share of educational expansion is caused by an increase in female enrollment in (higher) education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]