Intergenerational Mobility TORCHE 2015 CORAK 2013 TORCHE 2011

Intergenerational Mobility TORCHE 2015 CORAK 2013 TORCHE 2011 BREEN AND JONSSON 2005 PRESENTER: ZHANG 2018

Torche 2015 Absolute mobility is made of up structural mobility and relative mobility. Structural mobility: a consequence of exogenous economic and demographic factors such as technological change, economic policy, foreign trade. Structural mobility favor most people in the society. Relative mobility: refers to net effect of structural change, indicating the level of social fluidity or social openness or the degree of equality of opportunity in society. Structural mobility accounts more total mobility and the two cam compensate each other.

Occupational Status Advantages: easy to recall, easy to collect, and normally has high reliability and stability over a lifetime. Limitations: The income variance within the same occupation Could not account for gender differences

Classes Status Occupation plus income/wealth In practice, class are based on the following attributes of occupation: (1) employer/employee/self-employed; (2) skill level; (3) authority in the workplace (supervisor status and number of supervisees); (4) sector (urban/agricultural and manual/nonmanual).

Classes Status—the unit of analysis Conventional approach is to measure the class position of the father/husband Dominant approach is to measure the spouse with a stronger labor market involvement or higher class position Joint approach measures the combination of both spouses when they are both employed

Earning Mobility—three measurements (A)generational earning elasticity, log-transformed version of parents’ and children’s earnings. (B)Rank coefficient: run a regression of the percentile rank of children’s earnings on the percentile rank of parents’ earnings. (C)the intergenerational correlation by the ratio of the standard deviation of father’s earnings and children’s earnings. For example, the same coefficient for earning elasticity and earning rank has different meanings.

Total Family Income Mobility the role of assortative mating the influence on daughters The intergenerational income association tends to be higher than the earnings association Gender justification in income elasticity.

Different mobility with the measurements Education, as the biggest mediator for origin and destination association, plays different roles: For intergenerational occupational status : 85 percent For total family income association: around 50 percent

Nonlinearity—concave or convex Concave: strong association among poor families, weaker association among better-off families.

Nonlinearity—concave or convex Convex higher earning families are more likely to have highability children, since the optimal level of investment is higher for high-ability parents

Future: To invest more in education? investing in the human capital development of disadvantaged children and financing higher education To reduce the return to education? countries with lower returns to schooling and more progressive educational investments should feature higher levels of mobility

Corak 2013 The goal of this research is to understand: why America differ from other countries how intergenerational mobility will change in an era of higher inequality how the process is different for the top 1 percent

The Great Gatsby Curve The horizonal axis shows the Gini coefficient for disposable household income inequality; The vertical axis is a measure of intergenerational earning mobility between father and son using data on a cohort of children born during the early to mid-1960 s and measuring adult outcomes in the mid to late 1990 s

Intergenerational earnings elasticity

U. S. & CA In the United States, sons raised by top and bottom decile fathers are more likely to occupy the same position as their fathers than they are in Canada

The Mechanism: Income inequality shapes unequal opportunities (A) The genetic transmission of characteristics (B) The monetary and nonmonetary investment on children’s human capital (C) Family structure and parenting style matter

Another perspective: high return to education a college graduate earns about 70 percent more than a high school graduate, compared to about 30 percent in Canada Graduate and professional degrees experience a higher wage growth

For the top 1 percent: Intergenerational transmission of employers the intergenerational transmission of firm-specific skills Fathers have control over a firm and its hiring decision information about the labor market or “connection” help to structure a child’s job search through college choices and major choices access to unpaid internships

So: why America differ from other countries High cost of human capital. High return to human capital. Government programs in the United states are of relatively more benefit to the advantaged.

Torche 2011 Designs of this research: Study the intergenerational associations under the historical context of expanding number of colleges graduates. Apply different measurements to examine the intergenerational association including class, occupational status, individual earning, and family income. focus on the intergenerational association among those with advanced degrees

Horizontal stratification The institutional selectivity field of study Allocative inequality and within-occupation differences Allocative inequality refers to differences in occupational allocation, so that members of groups defined by ascription are concentrated in relatively low-paying occupations. Within-occupation rewards inequality emerges when members of disadvantaged ascriptive groups receive lower economic returns than their advantaged peers even if placed in the same occupations.

Four measurements: Social classes are occupational groupings Occupational status (socioeconomic status [SES]) scales rank detailed occupational categories on the basis of the educational attainment and earnings. Earnings are hourly earnings Total family income includes all sources of monetary income for all household members

Five Data Sources the General Social Survey (GSS) the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY 79) the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) National Longitudinal Surveys Original Cohorts (NLS) the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B)

Main finding—a “U-shape” intergenerational association is strong among those with low educational attainment it weakens or disappears among bachelor’s degree holders reemerges among those with advanced degrees

Horizontal stratification among BA holders Advantaged BA holders are more likely to attend selective institutions and holders are more likely to major in social sciences and less likely to major in education. Differential allocation in labor market: higher proportion of upper-background college graduates with a managerial job. Within-occupation differences: for managers and professionals, lower-background males make about 83% of the earnings received by their more advantaged counterparts.

Horizontal stratification among MA+ holders The BA holders from upper-class family are more likely to have reentered highly selective institutions and attain degrees in professional fields of study such as business, medicine, health, and law, and less likely to choose education and CSEM degrees. Differential allocation in labor market: higher proportion of upper-background college graduates with a managerial job. Within-occupation earnings, men with advanced degrees and lower income origins earn substantially less than their upper-background counterparts, a gap substantially higher than among BA holders.

Breen and Jonsson 2005 The aim of this research is to focus on : (a) the link between social origins and educational attainment (b) the overall association between social origins and occupational destinations.

Persistent Inequality (Shavit and Blossfeld 1993) Used OLS-regressions to measure the relations between background variables and outcomes. This book has some assumptions: (A)modernization hypothesis (B)reproduction (C)the socialist transformation hypothesis However, they find no evidence to support any of the hypotheses The results for international comparison is inconsistent

Micro-level and institutional explanation of educational inequality (A)Rational choice models: (B)Institutional factors will also influence such as the costs of education; ability grouping is also discussed. (C)Contextual effect on educational attainment.

Social fluidity Refers to the net association between absolute mobility and relative mobility There are two ways to explain the influence of education on social fluidity: Education could largely mediate the association between social origins and destinations. Compositional influence: the expanding of education can lead to an overall reduction of intergenerational association. But as more people attain higher levels of education, the origin-destination association at these higher levels might strengthen.

For future research: First step: produce an exhaustive list of the set of family resources and institutional factors that impinge on the opportunities of children A further step: develop models of the mechanisms through which these associations are generated. The ideal and natural next step is for a group of researchers from different countries to design a comparative project in which data collection and measurement are standardized across nations.

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