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We investigate whether coming from a higher socio-economic background is associated with greater labour market success, net of own achieved education. We replicate previous analyses on the direct effect of social origin, net of education, for Spain using a more recent and larger dataset that consists of the merged monthly barometer surveys by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. Compared to previous studies, we use a more refined classification for the respondent’s education and perform a novel parental occupation fixed effect analysis that allow us to identify the specific parental occupations in which the strongest direct intergenerational transmission of socio-economic advantage occurs. We find that there is a substantial direct association between parental background and the respondent socio-economic status, income and household income, over and above the respondent’s level of education. This result provides additional evidence that questions the idea that education is the great equalizer. We also show that the strongest intergenerational direct transmission of socio-economic advantages occurs for respondents whose parents either exert power and influence in large organisations or are liberal professionals in law or university professors. In the appendix we provide the Stata syntax for recoding the CNO11 Spanish classification of occupations into an index of socio-economic status (ISEI) and into the EGP and Oesch class schemes.

In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in how the effects of parental separation on children's educational attainment vary with social background. On the one hand, parents with more resources might be better able to prevent possible adverse events like separation to affect their children's outcomes. On the other hand, children from higher social backgrounds might have more resources to lose from a parental separation. A wide range of empirical studies on the issue have come to inconsistent conclusions, with support found for both perspectives. The aim of this paper is to monitor the influence of methodological and operational choices on the different results observed across studies. We focus on aspects such as the operationalization of key variables, the measurement of inequality in absolute and relative terms and the different strategies used to address endogeneity. We study the effects of parental separation on educational attainment for a cohort of British children born in 1970 and find that conclusions change depending on whether social background is measured using the mother's or father's characteristics and whether relative or absolute differences between groups are considered. Results are relatively insensitive to the operationalization of dependent variables and the treatment of missing data. When using data from Understanding Society instead of the British Cohort Study, results also did not change. We reflect on how these findings can explain the contradictory results from earlier studies on the topic, and how heterogeneity in the effects of parental separation by socio-economic background should be interpreted.

The consequences of high divorce rates for intergenerational mobility depend on two factors. The first has been widely studied and regards the differing incidence of divorce according to socio-economic background. The second has been studied less and is the heterogeneity in the effects of divorce according to parental background. This paper investigates whether signs from earlier research that children from higher social backgrounds suffer more from divorce can indeed be interpreted as such. We follow a cohort of British children born in 1970 (N = 11,073) and look at how educational and occupational outcomes differ depending on family structure, socio-economic background, and the interaction between them. We improve on earlier studies by including a rich set of pre-divorce characteristics and are able to show that heterogeneity in the effects of divorce indeed exists and is not likely to be due to selection effects. Children whose parents are more highly educated have a larger ‘divorce penalty’ when it comes to educational and occupational attainment. A large part of the heterogeneity can be explained by the parents’ income at age 16, parental monitoring, the child’s participation in extra-curricular activities and his or her views regarding the benefits of education at age 16. The results suggest that, in contrast to the emphasis put in much recent research, divorce seems to have been a factor contributing to increased intergenerational mobility in the period under study. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 320116 for the research project Families and Societies.

The objectives of the paper are 1) to analyse the effects of labour flexibility on individuals from a lifecourse perspective and 2) to know whether flexibility has undermined or reinforced the effects of social classes, education and gender on several aspects concerning the life-course, above all those related to employment in Spain. The peculiarity of the Spanish case lies in the proportion of fixed-term contracts. The greatest difference between these contracts and permanent contracts is not the job to be done, or even its temporary or permanent nature, but rather the lower layoff cost. The way that the Welfare State has introduced flexibilisation has achieved a balance of risks between the generations, so that there cannot be said to be clear winners or losers. The data indicate that the effects of flexibilisation on the main changes in the labour market and in demography are much more modest than what the hypotheses predict. Similarly, flexibilisation has not evened out the risks among the different social classes and educational levels, although it has not provoked an increase in inequality, either. Los objetivos del articulo son 1) analizar las consecuencias de la flexibilidad laboral en el curso vital de los individuos, 2) asi como saber si la flexibilidad ha socavado o reforzado la importancia de las clases sociales, de la educacion y del genero en distintos aspectos concernientes al curso vital, sobre todo relacionados con el empleo en Espana. La peculiaridad espanola con respecto a la flexibilidad radica en la alta proporcion de contratos temporales. La mayor diferencia entre estos contratos y los indefinidos es su menor coste de despido. La manera en la que el Estado del Bienestar ha introducido la flexibilidad ha logrado un equilibrio de riesgos entre generaciones, por lo que no puede decirse que haya unos claros ganadores o perdedores. Los datos indican que los efectos de la flexibilizacion sobre el curso vital de los individuos son mucho mas modestos de lo que las hipotesis preven. Asimismo, la flexibilización no ha mermado la importancia de las clases sociales ni de los niveles de estudio para explicar la posición de los individuos en el mercado laboral, aunque tampoco hay una clara evidencia de que las brechas entre los individuos de distintas clases ocupaciones o con distintos niveles de estudio hayan aumentado en Espana.

Profound social and economic transformations have taken place over the last two decades in modern societies. These changes are often referred to as globalization. The aim of this article is to examine whether processes of globalization have produced increasing convergence of employment-related aspects of national-level welfare regimes, industrial relation systems and mid-career employment paths among a set of industrialized nations. A theory of convergence is developed to explain the coercive-isomorphic and mimetic-imitation effects of globalization, followed by potential reasons for growing divergence. The study concludes that globalization has produced ' converging divergences' and not resulted in a simple convergence based on neoliberal and market employment-related policies that leads to a rise of patchwork careers for all employees. Rather, it has served to intensify existent differences between industrial relations in the welfare regime clusters of countries and accentuated within-country occupational class, educational and gender inequalities.

First Online: 20 March 2017 In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in how the effects of parental separation on children's educational attainment vary with social background. On the one hand, parents with more resources might be better able to prevent possible adverse events like separation to affect their children's outcomes. On the other hand, children from higher social backgrounds might have more resources to lose from a parental separation. A wide range of empirical studies on the issue have come to inconsistent conclusions, with support found for both perspectives. The aim of this paper is to monitor the influence of methodological and operational choices on the different results observed across studies. We focus on aspects such as the operationalization of key variables, the measurement of inequality in absolute and relative terms and the different strategies used to address endogeneity. We study the effects of parental separation on educational attainment for a cohort of British children born in 1970 and find that conclusions change depending on whether social background is measured using the mother's or father's characteristics and whether relative or absolute differences between groups are considered. Results are relatively insensitive to the operationalization of dependent variables and the treatment of missing data. When using data from Understanding Society instead of the British Cohort Study, results also did not change. We reflect on how these findings can explain the contradictory results from earlier studies on the topic, and how heterogeneity in the effects of parental separation by socio-economic background should be interpreted.