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"Choose the Plan That’s Right for You": Choice Devolution as Class-Biased Institutional Change in U.S. Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance

By on May 16, 2022 in Articles

Adam Goldstein, James Franklin Wharam

Sociological Science May 16, 2022
10.15195/v9.a10

Abstract

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This study examines the distributional consequences of U.S. employers’ efforts to devolve responsibility for managing their employees’ medical insurance risk. The logic of consumer choice has increasingly come to dominate insurance benefit design, requiring that employees learn to be their own actuaries. We ask, to what extent does the individuation of choice (between insurance plans with disparate levels of cost-sharing) alter the social stratification of out-of-pocket (OOP) medical expenditure burdens across socioeconomic status class strata? Our analysis draws on an insurance claims database from a large multi-employer commercial insurer, which includes information on plan offerings and realized OOP expenditure burdens for more than 37 million persons from 2002 to 2012. Consistent with expectations, the results of pooled difference-in-difference event study models reveal that transitions to devolved choice result in modestly greater increases in realized OOP burden among lower socioeconomic status enrollees, compared with the growth among higher-status enrollees. However, the magnitude of the increase in the between-class expenditure burden disparity is small in substantive terms.
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Adam Goldstein: Princeton University School of Public and International Affairs
E-mail: amg5@princeton.edu

James Franklin Wharam: Duke University Department of Medicine and Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy
E-mail: james.wharam@duke.edu

Acknowledgments:This study was generously supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Scholars in Health Policy Research Program. The authors thank Robert LeCates and Fang Zhang for sharing data and assistance with variable derivation. Katherine Swartz, Paul Starr, Jeremy Cohen, and Simone Schneider provided helpful comments on earlier drafts. The study benefited from the feedback of audiences and participants at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Annual Meeting, the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, and Princeton’s Center for the Study of Social Organization Seminar.

  • Citation: Goldstein, Adam, and James Franklin Wharam. 2022. “‘Choose the Plan That’s Right for You’: Choice Devolution as Class-Biased Institutional Change in U.S. Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance.” Sociological Science 9: 221-251.
  • Received: January 3, 2022
  • Accepted: March 21, 2022
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Cristobal Young
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a10


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Demographic Change and Group Boundaries in Germany: The Effect of Projected Demographic Decline on Perceptions of Who Has a Migration Background

By on May 9, 2022 in Articles

Johanna Gereke, Joshua Hellyer, Jan Behnert, Saskia Exner, Alexander Herbel, Felix Jäger, Dean Lajic, Štepán Mezenský, Vu Ngoc Anh, Tymoteusz Ogłaza, Jule Schabinger, Anna Sokolova, Daria Szafran, Noah Tirolf, Susanne Veit, and Nan Zhang

Sociological Science May 9, 2022
10.15195/v9.a9

Abstract

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In many Western societies, the current “native” majority will become a numerical minority sometime within the next century. How does prospective demographic change affect existing group boundaries? An influential recent article by Abascal (2020) showed that white Americans under demographic threat reacted with boundary contraction—that is, they were less likely to classify ambiguously white people as “white.” The present study examines the generalizability of these findings beyond the American context. Specifically, we test whether informing Germans about the projected decline of the “native” population without migration background affects the classification of phenotypically ambiguous individuals. Our results show that information about demographic change neither affects the definition of group boundaries nor generates negative feelings toward minority outgroups. These findings point to the relevance of contextual differences in shaping the conditions under which demographic change triggers group threat and boundary shifts.
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Johanna Gereke: Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES), University of Mannheim
E-mail: johanna.gereke@mzes.uni-mannheim.de

Joshua Hellyer: Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES), University of Mannheim
E-mail: joshua.hellyer@mzes.uni-mannheim.de

Jan Behnert: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: jbehnert@mail.uni-mannheim.de

Saskia Exner: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: sexner@mail.uni-mannheim.de

Alexander Herbel: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: aherbel@mail.uni-mannheim.de

Felix Jäger: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: jaeger@uni-mannheim.de

Dean Lajic: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: dlajic@mail.uni-mannheim.de

Štepán Mezenský: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: tmezensk@mail.uni-mannheim.de

Vu Ngoc Anh: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: vngocanh@mail.uni-mannheim.de

Tymoteusz Ogłaza: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: toglaza@mail.uni-mannheim.de

Jule Schabinger: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: jschabin@mail.uni-mannheim.de

Anna Sokolova: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: anna.sokolova@uni-mannheim.de

Daria Szafran: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: dszafran@mail.uni-mannheim.de

Noah Tirolf: School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
E-mail: notirolf@mail.uni-mannheim.de

Susanne Veit: German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM-Institut)
E-mail: veit@dezim-institut.de

Nan Zhang: Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES), University of Mannheim
E-mail: nan.zhang@mzes.uni-mannheim.de

Acknowledgments:This research was supported by funding from the Stifterverband and the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung for “Innovation in Teaching.”

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Gereke, Johanna, Joshua Hellyer, Jan Behnert, Saskia Exner, Alexander Herbel, Felix Jäger, Dean Lajic, Štepán Mezenský, Vu Ngoc Anh, Tymoteusz Ogłaza, Jule Schabinger, Anna Sokolova, Daria Szafran, Noah Tirolf, Susanne Veit, and Nan Zhang. 2022. “Demographic Change and Group Boundaries in Germany: The Effect of Projected Demographic Decline on Perceptions of Who Has a Migration Background.” Sociological Science 9: 206-220.
  • Received: January 12, 2022
  • Accepted: March 8, 2022
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Vida Maralani
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a9


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Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture

By on May 2, 2022 in Articles

Ted Underwood, Kevin Kiley, Wenyi Shang, Stephen Vaisey

Sociological Science May 2, 2022
10.15195/v9.a8

Abstract

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Many aspects of behavior are guided by dispositions that are relatively durable once formed. Political opinions and phonology, for instance, change largely through cohort succession. But evidence for cohort effects has been scarce in artistic and intellectual history; researchers in those fields more commonly explain change as an immediate response to recent innovations and events. We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,830 works of fiction from 1880 to 1999 and find that slightly more than half (54.7 percent) of the variance explained by time is explained better by an author’s year of birth than by a book’s year of publication. Writing practices do change across an author’s career. But the pace of change declines steeply with age. This finding suggests that existing histories of literary culture have a large blind spot: the early experiences that form cohorts are pivotal but leave few traces in the historical record.
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Ted Underwood: School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
E-mail: tunder@illinois.edu

Kevin Kiley: Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Iowa
E-mail: kevin-kiley@uiowa.edu

Wenyi Shang: School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
E-mail: wenyis3@illinois.edu

Stephen Vaisey: Department of Sociology, Duke University
E-mail: stephen.vaisey@duke.edu

Acknowledgments:The authors relied heavily on publication data manually constructed by Patrick Kimutis, Hoyt Long, Edwin Roland, Richard Jean So, and Jessica Witte; that data construction work was partially funded by SSHRC through the NovelTM project.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Underwood, Ted, Kevin Kiley, Wenyi Shang, and Stephen Vaisey. 2022. “Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture.” Sociological Science 9: 184-205.
  • Received: January 17, 2022
  • Accepted: March 16, 2022
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a8


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Marriage, Kids, and the Picket Fence? Household Type and Wealth among U.S. Households, 1989 to 2019

By on April 25, 2022 in Articles

Christine Percheski, Christina Gibson-Davis

Sociological Science April 25, 2022
10.15195/v9.a7

Abstract

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Evidence on how parenthood affects household wealth in the United States has been inconclusive, partially because previous studies have decontextualized parenthood from gender, marital, and relationship status. Yet, insights from economic sociology suggest that wealth-related behaviors are shaped by the intersection of identities, not by a binary classification of parental status. We examine net worth by the intersection of gender, parental, and relationship status during a period of increasing wealth inequality and family diversification. Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances from 1989 through 2019, we show that aggregate comparisons between parents and non-parents mask substantial wealth variation across nine household types. Despite changing social selection into marriage and parenthood, married parents consistently held a wealth advantage over demographically similar adults in other household types. Married parents’ wealth advantage descriptively arises from homeownership, perhaps because the combined spousal and parental identities are normatively and culturally associated with homeownership.
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Christine Percheski: Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
E-mail: c-percheski@northwestern.edu

Christina Gibson-Davis: Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
E-mail: cgibson@duke.edu

Acknowledgments: We gratefully acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation (award 1459631) and advice from Sara McLanahan, Michael Hout, Michelle Weinberger, and several anonymous reviewers.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Percheski, Christine, and Christina Gibson-Davis. 2022. “Marriage, Kids, and the Picket Fence? Household Type and Wealth among U.S. Households, 1989 to 2019.” Sociological Science 9: 159-183.
  • Received: March 10, 2021
  • Accepted: April 30, 2022
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Vida Maralani
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a7


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The Stalled Gender Revolution and the Rise of Top Earnings in the United States, 1980 to 2017

By on April 11, 2022 in Articles

Hadas Mandel, Assaf Rotman

Sociological Science April 11, 2022
10.15195/v9.a6

Abstract

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The steep rise of top wages is acknowledged as one of the main drivers of the rise in earnings inequality between workers in most postindustrial labor markets. Yet its relation to gender stratification, in particular to the stagnation in the gender pay gap, has received very little scholarly attention. Using data from the U.S. Current Population Survey, conducted between 1980 and 2017, we provide evidence of the enormous weight that the dynamic at the top of the earnings distribution exerts on the gender pay gap. We also show how this dynamic inhibits the consequences of the countervailing process of gender vertical desegregation. Although developments in gender inequality and in the rise of top wages have drawn extensive scholarly attention and have even penetrated into the public discourse in recent years, the two dimensions of inequality are often perceived as unrelated to one another. Our findings, then, highlight the connection between different forms of inequality—class inequality and gender inequality—a relation that demands much more attention in the new economy.
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Hadas Mandel: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University
E-mail: hadasm@tauex.tau.ac.il

Assaf Rotman: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University
E-mail: assafrot@tauex.tau.ac.il

Acknowledgments: We thank Amit Lazarus and Michael Shalev for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. This research was funded by the generous support of the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No. 724351). Authors are listed in alphabetical order, reflecting their equal contribution.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Mandel, Hadas, and Assaf Rotman. 2022. “The Stalled Gender Revolution and the Rise of Top Earnings in the United States, 1980 to 2017.” Sociological Science 9: 136-158.
  • Received: December 8, 2021
  • Accepted: January 26, 2022
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Cristobal Young
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a6


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Schedule Unpredictability and High-Cost Debt: The Case of Service Workers

By on April 4, 2022 in Articles

Mariana Amorim, Daniel Schneider

Sociological Science April 4, 2022
10.15195/v9.a5

Abstract

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High-cost financial services allow economically insecure families to make ends meet but often contribute to additional financial strain in the long run. This study uses novel data from the Shift Project to describe the link between schedule unpredictability and high-cost debt (i.e., payday loans, pawnshop loans, auto-title loans, overdrafts, and problematic credit card debt) among service workers. First, it compares the relative magnitude of the associations between high-cost debt, schedule unpredictability, and levels of income. Second, it investigates whether income volatility mediates the relationship between schedule unpredictability and high-cost debt. Finally, it describes whether the link between schedule unpredictability and high-cost debt varies by institutional and policy contexts. Results indicate that schedule unpredictability is a substantively meaningful, independent, and understudied dimension of inequality in financial outcomes.
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Mariana Amorim: Department of Sociology, Washington State University
E-mail: mariana.amorim@wsu.edu

Daniel Schneider: Department of Sociology, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University
E-mail: dschneider@hks.harvard.edu

Acknowledgments: We gratefully acknowledge support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (grant INV-002665), the RobertWood Johnson Foundation (award 74528), and theW. T. Grant Foundation (grant 188043). The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of these foundations. We also thank Timothy Flake for his feedback on corporate programs addressing financial well-being, Megan Bea for the suggestion to use the State-Mandated Education Database, and Evelyn Bellew and Annette Gailliot for research assistance.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Amorim, Mariana, and Daniel Schneider. 2022. “Schedule Unpredictability and High-Cost Debt: The Case of Service Workers.” Sociological Science 9:102-135.
  • Received: November 10, 2021
  • Accepted: January 17, 2022
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Cristobal Young
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a5


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The Religious Work Ethic and the Spirit of Patriarchy: Religiosity and the Gender Gap in Working for Its Own Sake, 1977 to 2018

By on March 9, 2022 in Articles

Landon Schnabel, Cyrus Schleifer, Eman Abdelhadi, Samuel L. Perry

Sociological Science March 9, 2022
10.15195/v9.a4

Abstract

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Societal beliefs about women’s work have long been a metric for gender equality, with recent scholarship focusing on trends in these attitudes to assess the progress (or stalling) of the gender revolution. Moving beyond widely critiqued gender attitude questions thought to be the only available items for measuring change over time, this article considers women’s and men’s views toward their own work over the last half century. Traditional gender scripts frame women’s labor force participation as less than ideal, something to do if financially necessary but not because work is intrinsically rewarding. Historically, this gender frame was reinforced by religion. We examine the gender gap in working for its own sake over time and whether and how religious involvement moderates these trends. Overall, the gender gap has declined to the point where it is now virtually nonexistent. However, religious involvement acts as a countervailing influence, bolstering the gap such that frequently attending men and women have not yet converged in their desire to work. Although the most religious Americans have not yet converged, men’s dropping desire to work and women’s rising desire to work are society-wide trends, and even the most religious Americans could be expected to converge at some point in the future. Traditionalist institutions contribute to unevenness in the gender revolution, but preferences cannot explain the persistent society-wide precarity of women’s work: Women now prefer to work for work’s sake at the same rate men do.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Landon Schnabel: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: schnabel@cornell.edu

Cyrus Schleifer: Department of Sociology, University of Oklahoma
E-mail: cyrus.schleifer@ou.edu

Eman Abdelhadi: Department of Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago
E-mail: abdelhadi@uchicago.edu

Samuel L. Perry: Department of Sociology, University of Oklahoma
E-mail: samperry@ou.edu

Acknowledgments: Direct correspondence to Landon Schnabel, Department of Sociology, Cornell University, 323 Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853. Email: schnabel@cornell.edu. The authors would like to thank Paula England, Brian Powell, and participants in the Cornell Center for the Study of Inequality Discussion Group for helpful feedback.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Schnabel, Landon, Cyrus Schleifer, Eman Abdelhadi, and Samuel L. Perry. 2022. “The Religious Work Ethic and the Spirit of Patriarchy: Religiosity and the Gender Gap in Working for Its Own Sake, 1977 to 2018.” Sociological Science 9: 75-101.
  • Received: October 26, 2021
  • Accepted: January 6, 2022
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a4


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Dog Whistles and Work Hours: The Political Activation of Labor Market Discrimination

By on March 2, 2022 in Articles

Adam Goldstein, Tod Hamilton

Sociological Science March 2, 2022
10.15195/v9.a3

Abstract

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Many commentators have suggested that Donald Trump’s 2016 election emboldened discrimination against racial minorities. We focus on changes in weekly work hours among hourly paid employees during the five months following the 2016 election (relative to 12 months prior). Using two-wave panel data from the Current Population Survey, we find that black workers suffered temporary work hours and earnings losses relative to white workers in areas where Trump received greater electoral support. There were no within-person declines among non-Hispanic whites in high-Trump-support areas or among any groups in lower-Trump-support areas. These patterns are not driven by seasonality, industrial composition, or pre-election trends, suggesting that Trump’s victory exacerbated racial disparities where he received strong electoral support. The findings reveal how political events can catalyze surges of discriminatory behavior in labor markets over the short to medium term, and they provide new evidence about the effects of Trump’s early presidency on U.S. race relations.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Adam Goldstein: Department of Sociology and School of International and Public Affairs, Princeton University
E-mail: amg5@princeton.edu

Tod Hamilton: Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research, Princeton University
E-mail: todh@princeton.edu

Acknowledgments: The authors thank seminar participants at Princeton University and Duke University for helpful comments.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Goldstein, Adam, and Tod Hamilton. 2022. “Dog Whistles and Work Hours: The Political Activation of Labor Market Discrimination.” Sociological Science 9: 40-74.
  • Received: December 7, 2021
  • Accepted: December 19, 2021
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Mario Small
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a3


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Education and Social Fluidity: A Reweighting Approach

By on February 23, 2022 in Articles

Kristian Bernt Karlson

Sociological Science February 23, 2022
10.15195/v9.a2

Abstract

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Although sociologists have devoted considerable attention to studying the role of education in intergenerational social class mobility using log-linear models for contingency tables, indings in this literature are not free from rescaling or non-collapsibility bias caused by adjusting for education in these models. Drawing on the methodological literature on inverse probability reweighting, I present a straightforward standardization approach free from this bias. The approach reweighs in an initial step the mobility table cell frequencies to create a pseudo-population in which social class origins and education are independent of each other, after which one can apply any loglinear model to the reweighted mobility table. In contrast to the Karlson-Holm-Breen method, the approach yields coefficients that are comparable across different studies because they are unaffected by education’s predictive power of class destinations. Moreover, the approach is easily applied to models for various types of mobility patterns such as those in the core model of fluidity; it yields a single summary measure of overall mediation; and it can incorporate several mediating variables, allowing researchers to control for additional merit proxies such as cognitive skills or potential confounders such as age. I illustrate the utility of the approach in four empirical examples.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kristian Bernt Karlson: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen
E-mail: kbk@soc.ku.dk

Acknowledgments: The research leading to the results presented in this article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 851293).

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Karlson, Kristian Bernt. 2022. “Education and Social Fluidity: A Reweighting Approach.” Sociological Science 9: 27-39.
  • Received: September 9, 2021
  • Accepted: December 16, 2021
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Filiz Garip
  • DOI: 10.15195/v9.a2


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