Tag Archives | Causality

The Effects of Social Mobility

Richard Breen, John Ermisch

Sociological Science April 29, 2024
10.15195/v11.a17


The question of how social mobility affects outcomes, such as political preferences, wellbeing, and fertility, has long been of interest to sociologists. But finding answers to this question has been plagued by, on the one hand, the non-identifiability of “mobility effects” as they are usually conceived in this literature, and, on the other, the fact that these “effects” are, in reality, partial associations which may or may not represent causal relationships. We advance a different approach, drawing on a causal framework that sees the destination categories as treatments whose effects may be heterogeneous across origin categories. Our view is that most substantive hypotheses have in mind a hypothetical within-person comparison, rather than a between-person comparison. This approach is not subject to many of the problematic issues that have beset earlier attempts to formulate a model of mobility effects, and it places the study of such effects on a more reliably causal footing. We show how our approach relates to previous attempts to model mobility effects and explain how it differs both conceptually and empirically. We illustrate our approach using political preference data from the United Kingdom.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Richard Breen: Nuffield College
E-mail: richard.breen@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

John Ermisch: Nuffield College
E-mail: john.ermisch@sociology.ox.ac.uk

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the editors, deputy editor and consulting editors for their helpful suggestions. We also thank Pablo Geraldo, and Guanhui Pan for comments on earlier drafts.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: A replication package for this article, called Mobility Effects, has been posted on OSF: https://osf.io/c34ta/.

  • Citation: Breen, Richard, and John Ermisch. 2024. “The Effects of Social Mobility.” Sociological Science 11: 467-488.
  • Received: January 8, 2024
  • Accepted: March 12, 2024
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Jeremy Freese
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a17


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Heterogeneous Causal Effects and Sample Selection Bias

Richard Breen, Seongsoo Choi, Anders Holm

Sociological Science, July 8, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a17

The role of education in the process of socioeconomic attainment is a topic of long standing interest to sociologists and economists. Recently there has been growing interest not only in estimating the average causal effect of education on outcomes such as earnings, but also in estimating how causal effects might vary over individuals or groups. In this paper we point out one of the under-appreciated hazards of seeking to estimate heterogeneous causal effects: conventional selection bias (that is, selection on baseline differences) can easily be mistaken for heterogeneity of causal effects. This might lead us to find heterogeneous effects when the true effect is homogenous, or to wrongly estimate not only the magnitude but also the sign of heterogeneous effects. We apply a test for the robustness of heterogeneous causal effects in the face of varying degrees and patterns of selection bias, and we illustrate our arguments and our method using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) data.
 
Richard Breen: Department of Sociology, Yale University.  Email: richard.breen@yale.edu

Seongsoo Choi: Department of Sociology, Yale University. Email: seongsoo.choi@yale.edu

Anders Holm: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. Email: ah@soc.ku.dk

  • Citation: Breen, Richard, Seongsoo Choi and Anders Holm. 2015. “Heterogeneous Causal Effects and Sample Selection Bias.” Sociological Science 2: 351-369.
  • Received: November 4, 2014.
  • Accepted: January 15, 2015
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen L. Morgan
  • DOI: 10.15195/v2.a17

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Making Up for an Unlucky Month of Birth in School: Causal Evidence on the Compensatory Advantage of Family Background in England

Fabrizio Bernardi, Michael Grätz

Sociological Science, May 6, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a12

Previous research has shown that being born in the months immediately preceding the school entry cut-off date leads to lower educational outcomes in countries with a strict admission policy. In this article we use the effect of age at school entry in England as an identification device to provide a causal estimate of the compensatory advantage enjoyed by children from high social origin families. We find that the negative effects of a young school entry age are stronger for children from low social origin families. We also investigate when social origin differences in school entry age effects emerge, and test possible mechanisms. We find that before starting school, a younger school entry age leads to lower test scores for children of both low and highly educated families. For children from highly educated families the negative effect, however, progressively declines over the school career and almost vanishes by age 16. With respect to the mechanisms underlying this compensatory effect, we find no strong mediating role for parental involvement in homework and private lessons or for school choice.
Fabrizio Bernardi: European University Institute Department of Political and Social Sciences.  Email: fabrizio.bernardi@eui.eu

Michael Grätz: European University Institute Department of Political and Social Sciences.   Email: michael.gratz@eui.eu

  • Citation: Bernardi, Fabrizio and Michael Grätz. 2015. “Making Up for an Unlucky Month of Birth in School: Causal Evidence on the Compensatory Advantage of Family Background in England.” Sociological Science 2:235-251
  • Received: November 13, 2014
  • Accepted: January 21, 2015
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen,  Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v2.a12

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