Tag Archives | Income Inequality

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Drawing on individual-level full-population data from Sweden, spanning four decades, we investigate the joint growth of income inequality and income segregation. We study Sweden as a “least likely” case comparison with the United States, given Sweden’s historically low levels of inequality and its comprehensive welfare state. Against the background of U.S.-based scholarship documenting a close link between inequality and segregation, our study provides an important insight into the universality of this relationship. Using entropy-based segregation measures, we analyze trends and patterns of income segregation between and within income groups along different sociodemographic dimensions—migration background and family type. Our findings reveal that growing income inequality in the last 30 years has been accompanied by a sharp uptake in income segregation, especially for the bottom quartile of the income distribution who are facing increasing isolation. Income segregation is most extensive for individuals with children in the household, among whom it has increased at a higher rate than those without children. Interestingly, income segregation is lower among non-Western minorities than among majority-group Swedes. We conclude that changes to the welfare state, liberalization of the housing market, and rapid demographic changes have led Sweden onto a path that is difficult to distinguish from that taken by the United States.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Selcan Mutgan: Department of Management and Engineering, Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University
E-mail: selcan.mutgan@liu.se

Jonathan J. B. Mijs: Department of Sociology, Boston University; Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam
E-mail: mijs@bu.edu

Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Maria Brandén, Jackelyn Hwang, Peter Hedström, and Jaap Nieuwenhuis for helpful feedback and comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. For their parts in the research on which the results are based, S.M. received funding from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), grant numbers DNR 340-2013-5460, 445-2013-7681, and DNR 2020-02488, and J.J.B.M. received funding from a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, EU Commission Horizon 2020 grant number 88296, and a Veni grant (number VI.Veni.201S.003) from the Dutch Research Council.

Citation: Mutgan, Selcan, and Jonathan J. B. Mijs. 2023. “Income Inequality and Residential Segregation in ‘Egalitarian’ Sweden: Lessons from a Least Likely Case.” Sociological Science 10:374-402.
Received: December 9, 2022
Accepted: January 14, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Cristobal Young
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a12

The Intergenerational Transmission of Family-Income Advantages in the United States

By Parker Webservices on May 15, 2019 in Articles

Pablo A. Mitnik, Victoria Bryant, Michael Weber

Sociological Science, May 15, 2019
10.15195/v6.a15

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Estimates of economic persistence and mobility in the United States, as measured by the intergenerational elasticity (IGE), cover a very wide range. Nevertheless, careful analyses of the evidence suggested until recently that as much as half, and possibly more, of economic advantages are passed on from parents to children. This “dominant hypothesis” was seriously challenged by the first-ever study of family-income mobility based on tax data (Chetty et al. 2014), which provided estimates of family-income IGEs indicating that only one-third of economic advantages are transmitted across generations and claimed that previous highly influential IGE estimates were upward biased. Using a different tax-based data set, this article provides estimates of family-income IGEs that strongly support the dominant hypothesis. The article also carries out a one-to-one comparison between IGEs estimated with the two tax-based data sets and shows that Chetty et al.’s estimates were driven downward by a combination of attenuation, life-cycle, selection, and functional-form biases. Lastly, the article determines the exact relationship between parental income inequality, economic persistence, and inequality of opportunity for income. This leads to the conclusion that, in the United States, at least half of income inequality among parents is transformed into inequality of opportunity among their children.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Pablo A. Mitnik: Center on Poverty and Inequality, Stanford University
E-mail: pmitnik@stanford.edu

Victoria Bryant: Statistics of Income Division, Internal Revenue Service
E-mail: victoria.l.bryant@irs.gov

Michael Weber: Statistics of Income Division, Internal Revenue Service
E-mail: michael.e.weber@irs.gov

Acknowledgements: The first author gratefully acknowledges research support from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts. The editors provided valuable feedback on an earlier version of the article. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not represent the opinions of the Internal Revenue Service or the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Citation: Mitnik, Pablo A., Victoria Bryant, and Michael Weber. 2019. “The Intergenerational Transmission of Family-Income Advantages in the United States.” Sociological Science 6: 380-415.
Received: February 4, 2019
Accepted: March 29, 2019
Editors: Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a15

Income Inequality and the Persistence of Racial Economic Disparities

By Parker Webservices on March 12, 2018 in Articles

Robert Manduca

Sociological Science, March 12, 2018
DOI 10.15195/v5.a8

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More than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act, black–white family income disparities in the United States remain almost exactly the same as what they were in 1968. This article argues that a key and underappreciated driver of the racial income gap has been the national trend of rising income inequality. From 1968 to 2016, black–white disparities in family income rank narrowed by almost one-third. But this relative gain was negated by changes to the national income distribution that resulted in rapid income growth for the richest—and most disproportionately white—few percentiles of the country combined with income stagnation for the poor and middle class. But for the rise in income inequality, the median black–white family income gap would have decreased by about 30 percent. Conversely, without the partial closing of the rank gap, growing inequality alone would have increased the racial income gap by 30 percent.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Robert Manduca: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
Email: rmanduca@g.harvard.edu

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Victoria Asbury, Alex Bell, Lawrence Bobo, Hope Harvey, Nathaniel Hendren, Roland Neil, Devah Pager, Robert Sampson, Roseanna Sommers, James Sidanius, Mo Torres, Adam Travis, Bruce Western, and the seminar participants at the Harvard University Contemporary Studies of Race and Ethnicity Workshop for their helpful comments and feedback. This research has been supported by the Harvard Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy.

Citation: Manduca, Robert. 2018. “Income Inequality and the Persistence of Racial Economic Disparities.” Sociological Science 5: 182-205.
Received: December 11, 2017
Accepted: January 6, 2018
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v5.a8

How Much Scope for a Mobility Paradox? The Relationship between Social and Income Mobility in Sweden

By Jesper Sorensen on February 4, 2016 in Articles

Richard Breen, Carina Mood, Jan O. Jonsson

Sociological Science, February 4, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a3

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It is often pointed out that conclusions about intergenerational (parent–child) mobility can differ depending on whether we base them on studies of class or income. We analyze empirically the degree of overlap in income and social mobility; we demonstrate mathematically the nature of their relationship; and we show, using simulations, how intergenerational income correlations relate to relative social mobility rates. Analyzing Swedish longitudinal register data on the incomes and occupations of over 300,000 parent–child pairs, we find that social mobility accounts for up to 49 percent of the observed intergenerational income correlations. This figure is somewhat greater for a fine-graded micro-class classification than a five-class schema and somewhat greater for women than men. There is a positive relationship between intergenerational social fluidity and income correlations, but it is relatively weak. Our empirical results, and our simulations verify that the overlap between income mobility and social mobility leaves ample room for the two indicators to move in different directions over time or show diverse patterns across countries. We explain the circumstances in which income and social mobility will change together or co-vary positively and the circumstances in which they will diverge.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Richard Breen: Nuffield College, Oxford University; Department of Sociology, Oxford University. Email: richard.breen@nuttfield.ox.ac.uk

Carina Mood: Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University; Institute for Futures Studies. Email: carina.mood@iffs.se

Jan O. Jonsson: Nuffield College, Oxford university; Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University. Email: janne.jonsson@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Acknowledgements: Thanks to participants at the RC28 meeting at the University of Virginia, August 2012, and particularly Mike Hout and Matt Lawrence, for comments on an earlier draft. Mood and Jonsson acknowledge financial support from the Swedish Council for Health, Working Life, and Welfare (FAS 2009-1320; FORTE 2012-1741) and from the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (RJ P12-0636:1).

Citation: Breen, Richard, Carina Mood and Jan O. Jonsson. 2015. “How Much Scope for a Mobility Paradox? The Relationship between Social and Income Mobility in Sweden.” Sociological Science 3: 39-60.
Received: March 20, 2015.
Accepted: April 16, 2015.
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a3

Income Inequality and Education

By Jesper Sorensen on August 26, 2015 in Articles

Richard Breen, Inkwan Chung

Sociological Science, August 26, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a22

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Many commentators have seen the growing gap in earnings and income between those with a college education and those without as a major cause of increasing inequality in the United States and elsewhere. In this article we investigate the extent to which increasing the educational attainment of the US population might ameliorate inequality. We use data from NLSY79 and carry out a three-level decomposition of total inequality into within-person, between-person and between-education parts. We find that the between-education contribution to inequality is small, even when we consider only adjusted inequality that omits the within-person component. We carry out a number of simulations to gauge the likely impact on inequality of changes in the distribution of education and of a narrowing of the differences in average incomes between those with different levels of education. We find that any feasible educational policy is likely to have only a minor impact on income inequality.

Richard Breen: Nuffield College and Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. Email: richard.breen@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Inkwan Chung: Department of Sociology, Yale University. Email: inkwan.chung@yale.edu