Income Inequality
Convergence in National Income Distributions
Rob Clark
Previous studies have drawn attention to cross-national convergence across a wide range of topics. In this study, I test for convergence in a new empirical setting, examining the degree to which national income distributions have become more similar to one another over time. Using the Standardized World Income Inequality Database, I construct a set of samples that vary in longitudinal and cross-sectional coverage during the 1965–2005 period. The results show that national income distributions have converged substantially since the 1970s. Moreover, the rise in inequality among Eastern European nations during the early 1990s accounts for only about 30 percent of all convergence during the sample period. Additional analyses suggest that globalization may be playing an important role in homogenizing inequality levels. Finally, a decomposition of the convergence trend shows that income distributions are drawing closer together both between and within world regions. Overall, convergence is the product of (a) inequality levels rising among egalitarian societies; and (b) inequality levels declining in stratified nations, indicating a trend toward moderate levels of inequality from both directions.
Economic Elites, Investments, and Income Inequality
Michael Nau
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.
Intergenerational Determinants of Income Level in Finland
Outi Sirniö, Pekka Martikainen, Timo M. Kauppinen
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.
Networks
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else Is Doing It Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample
Rose McDermott, James H. Fowler, Nicholas A. Christakis
Divorce represents the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we exploit a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. The results suggest that divorce can spread between friends. Clusters of divorces extend to two degrees of separation in the network. Popular people are less likely to get divorced; divorcées have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcées. Interestingly, the presence of children does not influence the likelihood of divorce, but each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages may serve to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends beyond those directly affected.
Population Size, Network Density, and the Emergence of Inherited Inequality
Reuben J. Thomas, Noah P. Mark
The inheritance of social standing from one generation to the next did not occur for most of the time that humans have lived, but became common only once human societies grew beyond a certain size. This paper offers a theory of how social inheritance may have resulted from this change in size, simply through the accompanying decrease in social network density. This decrease brought about differentiation in social network positions, creating structural advantages and disadvantages in group decision processes. As these processes determined social worth and leadership in societies, social network position became integral to social status and political prestige. And because network position tends to be passed from parent to child, social status came to be passed on, not (at first) through the inheritance of power or property, but through the inheritance of social connections. To illustrate the relationship between structural advantage and network density, we use a mathematical model of social influence in an array of small networks, as well as larger random networks to show how network position becomes increasingly determinant of social status as density decreases and network positions become increasingly differentiated. We use these results to further predict the conditions under which “who you know” matters more than “what you know.”
Do Social Connections Create Trust? An Examination Using New Longitudinal Data
Jennifer L. Glanville, Matthew A. Andersson, Pamela Paxton
The origins of generalized trust remain unclear despite its importance to social, political, and economic functioning. Social capital theory and previous cross-sectional research suggest that informal social ties may be a source of trust. Using the 2006–2008 General Social Survey panel, we assess the relationship between changes in informal social ties and changes in trust. As the first US longitudinal analysis to address this question, our fixed-effects analysis is not biased by time-invariant factors, such as personality, or other sources of unobserved heterogeneity. We further control for changes in religious attendance, television viewing, family structure, health status, and educational attainment. Our fixed-effects results, as well as results from an auxiliary cross-lagged analysis, yield support for the proposition that informal social ties enhance trust.
Crime
Micro- and Macro-Environment Population and the Consequences for Crime Rates
John R. Hipp, Aaron Roussell
Few studies have explored Louis Wirth’s propositions regarding the independent effects of population size and density, due to the conceptual difficulty in distinguishing between them. We directly address this conundrum by conceptualizing these as micro-population density and macro-population density. We propose two novel measures for these constructs: population density exposure to capture micro-density, and a measure of population within a twenty-mile radius to capture macro-density. We combine the theoretical insights of Wirth with routine activities theory to posit and find strong nonlinear effects of micro-density on crime rates, as well as the moderating effect of macro-density. We find strong evidence of macro social processes for population size, including that (1) its strongest effect occurred for crimes generally between strangers (robberies and motor vehicle thefts); (2) there was virtually no effect for homicides, a type of crime that often occurs among non-strangers. For micro-density, our findings include (1) strong curvilinear effects for the three types of property crime; (2) diminishing positive effects for robbery and homicide; and (3) a strikingly different pattern for aggravated assault. The effects for micro-density are stronger than for macro-density, a finding unexplored in the extant literature. We discuss the implications of these results within the context of Wirth’s theoretical framework as well as routine activities theory and suggest ways to extend these findings.
Immigrant Revitalization and Neighborhood Violent Crime in Established and New Destination Cities
David M. Ramey
Recently, scholars examining the link between immigration and crime have proposed an “immigrant revitalization perspective,” wherein larger immigrant populations are associated with reduced violent crime in aggregate areas. However, research supporting this claim typically draws on findings from research on heavily Latino neighborhoods in “established destination cities” and rarely takes into account the massive dispersal of immigrants across the country at the end of the twentieth century. Using a representative sample of neighborhoods in large US cities, this project analyzes violent crime rates for 8,628 census tracts, divided by racial and ethnic composition, nested within 84 cities, classified by immigration history or “destination” status. Findings suggest that the immigrant revitalization process may be heavily contingent on neighborhood- and city-level context. Specifically, neighborhoods with relatively small and recent immigrant populations may rely on receptive contexts provided by established destinations to revitalization neighborhoods and contribute to lower violent crime rates.
China
Emigration from China in Comparative Perspective
Yao Lu, Zai Liang, Miao David Chunyu
Comparative research on international migration has increasingly focused on immigrant integration rather than the process of emigration. By investigating the different streams of Chinese migration to the United States and Europe, as well as the different stages of Chinese migration to the United States, this study examines the way in which both receiving and sending contexts combine to shape the process of emigration. Using data from a 2002–2003 survey of emigration from China’s Fujian Province, we demonstrate that under restrictive exit and entry policies and high barriers to migration (i.e., clandestine migration from Fuzhou to the United States), resources such as migrant social capital, political capital (cadre resources), and human capital all play a crucial role in the emigration process. However, the roles of these resources in the migration process are limited when migration barriers are sufficiently low and when local governments adopt proactive policies promoting emigration (i.e., legal migration from Mingxi to Europe). Comparisons over time suggest that the importance of migrant social capital, political capital, and human capital has strongly persisted for Fuzhou-US emigration, as a result of tightening exit and entry policies. Despite these marked differences between Fuzhou and Mingxi emigration, the results also point to two general processes that are highly consistent across settings and over time—the cumulative causation of migration and the advantage conferred by traditional positional power (cadre status).
Community Poverty, Industrialization, and Educational Gender Gaps in Rural China
Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng, Emily Hannum
This paper investigates community impoverishment and industrialization as explanations for educational gender gaps in rural China with analysis of a multi-province household survey and a longitudinal study of youth in one impoverished province. We consider attributes of poor communities that might shape gaps and the related roles of household and community poverty. Three major results emerge from this paper: community impoverishment, not industrialization, correlates with gaps; poverty and isolation shape gaps differently at different educational levels; and girls in relatively wealthy households fare better than boys at the transition to high school. Results suggest the importance of theorizing differences by educational stage and the need for research that conceptualizes the non-local dimensions of industrialization as potential considerations in educational decisions.
Work
The Hidden Costs of Contingency: Employers’ Use of Contingent Workers and Standard Employees’ Outcomes
David S. Pedulla
The rise of contingent employment relations has been one of the most profound shifts in the US economy over the past forty years. While recent scholarship has begun to examine the consequences of organizations’ use of contingent workers for the full-time, standard employees in those workplaces, important limitations remain in this line of research. First, much of the research in this area relies on small, nonrandom samples of organizations and data that are decades old. Second, limited attention has been paid to the mechanisms through which the use of contingent workers shapes standard employees’ attitudes and outcomes. Finally, the varied consequences of using different types of contingent workers have been underdeveloped in the literature. In this article, we address these limitations of existing research, contributing insights about the differential consequences of how organizations obtain flexibility as well as the nature of job insecurity in the “new economy.”
What’s So Special about STEM? A Comparison of Women’s Retention in STEM and Professional Occupations
Jennifer L. Glass, Sharon Sassler, Yael Levitte, Katherine M. Michelmore
We follow female college graduates in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and compare the trajectories of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-related occupations to other professional occupations. Results show that women in STEM occupations are significantly more likely to leave their occupational field than professional women, especially early in their career, while few women in either group leave jobs to exit the labor force. Family factors cannot account for the differential loss of STEM workers compared to other professional workers. Few differences in job characteristics emerge either, so these cannot account for the disproportionate loss of STEM workers. What does emerge is that investments and job rewards that generally stimulate field commitment, such as advanced training and high job satisfaction, fail to build commitment among women in STEM.
Comparative/Historical
The Influence of Political Dynamics on Southern Lynch Mob Formation and Lethality
Ryan Hagen, Kinga Makovi, Peter Bearman
Existing literature focuses on economic competition as the primary causal factor in Southern lynching. Political drivers have been neglected, as findings on their effects have been inconclusive. We show that these consensus views arise from selection on a contingent outcome variable: whether mobs intent on lynching succeed. We constructed an inventory of averted lynching events in Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina—instances in which lynch mobs formed but were thwarted, primarily by law enforcement. We combined these with an inventory of lynching and analyzed them together to model the dynamics of mob formation, success, and intervention. We found that low Republican vote share is associated with a higher lethality rate for mobs. Lynching is better understood as embedded in a post-conflict political system, wherein all potential lynching events, passing through the prism of intervention, are split into successful and averted cases.
Welfare States and the Redistribution of Happiness
Hiroshi Ono, Kristen Schultz Lee
We use data from the 2002 International Social Survey Programme, with roughly 42,000 individuals nested within twenty-nine countries, to examine the determinants of happiness in a comparative perspective. We hypothesize that social democratic welfare states redistribute happiness among policy-targeted demographic groups in these countries. The redistributive properties of the social democratic welfare states generate an alternate form of “happiness inequality” in which winners and losers are defined by marital status, presence of children, and income. We apply multilevel modeling and focus on public social expenditures (as percentage of GDP) as proxy measures of state intervention at the macro level, and happiness as the specific measure of welfare outcome at the micro level. We find that aggregate happiness is not greater in the social democratic welfare states, but happiness closely reflects the redistribution of resources in these countries. Happiness is redistributed from low-risk to high-risk individuals. For example, women with small children are significantly happier, but single persons are significantly less happy in the welfare states. This suggests that the pro-family ideology of the social democratic welfare states protects families from social risk and improves their well-being at the cost of single persons. Further, we find that the happiness gap between high- versus low-income earners is considerably smaller in the social democratic welfare states, suggesting that happiness is redistributed from the privileged to the less privileged.
Environment
Intensifying the Countryside: A Sociological Study of Cropland Lost to the Built Environment in the United States, 2001–2006
Matthew Thomas Clement, Elizabeth Podowski
This study illuminates the systemic drivers of land-use intensification with the example of cropland lost in the construction of the built environment. The analysis integrates county-level variables from US government sources with data from the National Land Cover Database, which tracks permutations of specific land-use transitions over time. In a fixed-effects analysis, the area of cropland lost to the built environment is regressed on different measures of population and economic growth. Results indicate that natural increase and net migration differentially affect the loss of cropland at the local level across the continental United States, challenging the traditional focus in environmental sociology on overall population growth. This study also advances the concept of aristocratic conservation as a process by which increasing residential affluence slows down the intensification of land. The results of the analysis are discussed in terms of what land-use intensification means for environmental sustainability and town-country relations.
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