Tag Archives | Stratification

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We investigate the impact of analytical choices on country comparisons in intergenerational educational mobility using a multiverse approach. A literature survey gives rise to 2,880 plausible ways of measuring educational mobility, which we apply to European Social Survey data from 16 countries. Although some countries consistently appear at the top or bottom of the mobility rankings, most show substantial variation. Beyond our methodological contribution, we report two substantive findings. First, some countries often characterized as low-mobility emerge as matching or surpassing the egalitarian Nordic countries, reinforcing the view that wider mobility differences cannot be attributed solely to the education system but must be sought elsewhere, such as the labor market. Second, the choice of parameter—such as regression coefficients, correlations, or categorical measures—is the single most influential factor that shifts country rankings. As different parameters carry distinct theoretical meanings, researchers should treat parameter choice not merely as a robustness check but as an opportunity to test and refine competing theories.

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

Ely Strömberg: Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam.
E-mail: e.o.stromberg@uva.nl
Per Engzell: UCL Social Research Institute, University College London; Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University.
E-mail: p.engzell@ucl.ac.uk

Acknowledgments: Per Engzell acknowledges funding from the European Research Coun- cil, grant no. 101165962 (MaMo). Earlier versions of this work were presented at the 2023 Spring Meeting of the ISA Research Committee 28 on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28) in Paris, the 2024 Conference of the European Consortium for Sociolog- ical Research (ECSR) in Barcelona, and in seminars at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) and the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR). For comments that improved the manuscript, we thank Editor-in-Chief Arnout van de Rijt, Deputy Editor Kristian Karlson, two external reviewers, as well as Adam Altmejd, Krzysztof Czarnecki, Harry Ganzeboom, Jan Helmdag, Mike Hout, Linda Kridahl, Liliya Leopold, Silke Schneider, Edvin Syk, Max Thaning, Jens-Peter Thomsen, An- dreas Videbæk Jensen, Kim Weeden, Herman van de Werfhorst, and Daniel Wilhelm. Any errors remain our own.

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Reproducibility Package: The microdata underlying our analyses are available to download from the European Social Survey. Code necessary to reproduce the results is available at: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/VCDSX

Citation: Strömberg, Ely, Per Engzell. 2025. “How Robust Are Country Rankings in Educational Mobility?” Sociological Science 12: 891-922.
Received: July 9, 2025
Accepted: October 13, 2025
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Kristian B. Karlson
DOI: 10.15195/v12.a36

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

By Parker Webservices on May 16, 2022 in Articles

Adam Goldstein, James Franklin Wharam

Sociological Science May 16, 2022
10.15195/v9.a10

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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.

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

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

Education and Social Fluidity: A Reweighting Approach

By Parker Webservices on February 23, 2022 in Articles

Kristian Bernt Karlson

Sociological Science February 23, 2022
10.15195/v9.a2

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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.

This 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).

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

Is Denmark a Much More Educationally Mobile Society than the United States? Comment on Andrade and Thomsen, "Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Denmark and the United States" (2018)

By Parker Webservices on November 17, 2021 in Articles

Kristian Bernt Karlson

Sociological Science November 17, 2021
10.15195/v8.a17

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I evaluate Andrade and Thomsen (A&T)’s (2018) study, which concludes that Denmark is significantly more educationally mobile than the United States. I make three observations. First, A&T overstate the difference in educational mobility between Denmark and the United States. Both in international comparison and compared with differences in intergenerational income mobility, A&T’s reported country differences in educational mobility are negligible. For example, whereas income mobility estimates reported in the literature differ by 300 to 600 percent between the two countries, the corresponding educational mobility estimates that A&T report differ by 10 to 20 percent. Second, I provide evidence suggesting that A&T’s use of crude categorical education measures leads them to overstate these negligible differences. Third, A&T’s empirical analyses of the U.S. data contain several statistical and data-related flaws, some so severe that they potentially undermine the credibility of their analyses. In sum, A&T’s results are perfectly consistent with the existence of a mobility paradox very similar to what Sweden–United States comparisons show: although Denmark and the United States are dissimilar with respect to income mobility, they are similar with respect to educational mobility. Understanding the nature of this paradox should be a key concern for future mobility research.

This 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

Citation: Karlson, Kristian Bernt. 2021. “Is Denmark a Much More Educationally Mobile Society than the United States? Comment on Andrade and Thomsen, ‘Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Denmark and the United States’ (2018).” Sociological Science 8: 346-358.
Received: June 11, 2021
Accepted: July 11, 2021
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Filiz Garip
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a17

The Inheritance of Race Revisited: Childhood Wealth and Income and Black–White Disadvantages in Adult Life Chances

By Parker Webservices on December 1, 2020 in Articles

David Brady, Ryan Finnigan, Ulrich Kohler, Joscha Legewie

Sociological Science December 1, 2020
10.15195/v7.a25

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Vast racial inequalities continue to prevail across the United States and are closely linked to economic resources. One particularly prominent argument contends that childhood wealth accounts for black–white (BW) disadvantages in life chances. This article analyzes how much childhood wealth and childhood income mediate BW disadvantages in adult life chances with Panel Study of Income Dynamics and Cross-National Equivalent File data on children from the 1980s and 1990s who were 30+ years old in 2015. Compared with previous research, we exploit longer panel data, more comprehensively assess adult life chances with 18 outcomes, and measure income and wealth more rigorously. We find large BW disadvantages in most outcomes. Childhood wealth and income mediate a substantial share of most BW disadvantages, although there are several significant BW disadvantages even after adjusting for childhood wealth and income. The evidence mostly contradicts the prominent claim that childhood wealth is more important than childhood income. Indeed, the analyses mostly show that childhood income explains more of BW disadvantages and has larger standardized coefficients than childhood wealth. We also show how limitations in prior wealth research explain why our conclusions differ. Replication with the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and a variety of robustness checks support these conclusions.

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

David Brady: School of Public Policy, University of California, Riverside, and WZB Berlin Social Science Center
E-mail: dbrady@ucr.edu

Ryan Finnigan: Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis
E-mail: rfinnigan@ucdavis.edu

Ulrich Kohler: Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Potsdam
E-mail: ukohler@uni-potsdam.de

Joscha Legewie: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
E-mail: jlegewie@fas.harvard.edu

Acknowledgments: Direct correspondence to David Brady, School of Public Policy, University of California, INTS 4133, 900 University Ave., Riverside, CA 92521; email:dbrady@ucr.edu. The last three authors are listed alphabetically and contributed equally. This article benefitted from presentations at the New York University–Abu Dhabi Social Research and Public Policy seminar; University of California, Santa Barbara, Broom Center for Demography; the PAA meetings; the University of California Riverside Applied/Development Economics Brown Bag; theWorking Groups on Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility and Movements, Organizations, and Markets in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles; and the WZBUSP Writing Workshop. We appreciate suggestions from Sociological Science reviewers and editor Jesper Sorensen, Thomas Biegert, Agnes Blome, Irene Boeckmann, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Tyson Brown, Mareike Buenning, Rich Carpiano, Joe Cummins, Chenoa Flippen, Sanjiv Gupta, Martin Hällsten, Lena Hipp, Sabine Huebgen, Bob Kaestner, Sasha Killewald, Nadia Kim, Matthew Mahutga, Fabian Pfeffer, Emanuela Struffolino, Florencia Torche, Zachary Van Winkle, Andres Villarreal, and Hanna Zagel.

Citation: Brady, David, Ryan Finnigan, Ulrich Kohler, and Joscha Legewie. 2020. “The Inheritance of Race Revisited: Childhood Wealth and Income and Black–White Disadvantages in Adult Life Chances.” Sociological Science 7: 599-627.
Received: August 7, 2020
Accepted: September 24, 2020
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v7.a25

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

Deporting the American Dream: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Foreclosures

By Parker Webservices on December 8, 2016 in Articles

Jacob S. Rugh, Matthew Hall

Sociological Science, December 8, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a46

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Over the past decade, Latinos have been buffeted by two major forces: a record number of immigrant deportations and the housing foreclosure crisis. Yet, prior work has not assessed the link between the two. We hypothesize that deportations exacerbate rates of foreclosure among Latinos by removing income earners from owner-occupied households. We employ a quasi-experimental approach that leverages variation in county applications for 287(g) immigration enforcement agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and data on foreclosure filings from 2005–2012. These models uncover a substantial association of enforcement with Hispanic foreclosure rates. The association is stronger in counties with more immigrant detentions and a larger share of undocumented persons in owner-occupied homes. The results imply that local immigration enforcement plays an important role in understanding why Latinos experienced foreclosures most often. The reduced home ownership and wealth that result illustrate how legal status and deportation perpetuate the racial stratification of Latinos.

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

Jacob S. Rugh: Department of Sociology, Brigham Young University
Email: jacob_rugh@byu.edu

Matthew Hall: Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University
Email: mhall@cornell.edu

Acknowledgements: We are very grateful to Jim Bachmeier for county unauthorized data and to Stephanie Potochnick, Juan Pedroza, and William Rosales for sharing 287(g) rejection FOIAs. We also thank Doug Massey, Jordan Matsudaira, Jody Vallejo, Scott Sanders, and Jon Jarvis for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Citation: Rugh, Jacob S., and Matthew Hall. 2016. “Deporting the American Dream: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Foreclosures.” Sociological Science 3: 1053-1076.
Received: September 26, 2016
Accepted: November 2, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a46

Growing Farther Apart: Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Household Wealth Across the Distribution

By Parker Webservices on September 12, 2016 in Articles

Michelle Maroto

Sociological Science, September 12, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a34

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This article investigates net worth disparities by race and ethnicity using pooled data from the 1998–2013 waves of the U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances. I apply unconditional quantile regression models to examine net worth throughout the wealth distribution and decomposition procedures to demonstrate how different factors related to demographics, human capital, financial attitudes, and credit market access contribute to racial wealth disparities. In the aggregate, non-Hispanic black households held $8,000 less in net worth than non-Hispanic white households at the 10th percentile, $204,000 less at the median, and $1,055,000 at the 90th percentile. Hispanic households faced similar disadvantages, holding $4,000 less in net worth at the 10th percentile, $208,000 less at the median, and $1,023,000 less at the 90th percentile. Disparities continued, but declined, after accounting for labor market disadvantages and credit market access, which again varied across the distribution. Decomposition models show that demographic and income differences mattered more for high-wealth households. These variables accounted for 43–55 percent of the gap for high-wealth households at the 90th percentile but only 10–28 percent at the 10th percentile. Among low-wealth households, differential access to credit markets and homeownership was associated with a larger proportion of the gap in net worth.

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

Michelle Maroto: Department of Sociology, University of Alberta
Email: maroto@ualberta.ca

Acknowledgements: This research was partially supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant (#430-2014-00092).

Citation: Maroto, Michelle. 2016. “Growing Farther Apart: Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Household Wealth Across the Distribution.” Sociological Science 3: 801-824.
Received: May 11, 2016
Accepted: June 13, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a34

The Bell Curve Revisited: Testing Controversial Hypotheses with Molecular Genetic Data

By Parker Webservices on July 5, 2016 in Articles

Dalton Conley, Benjamin Domingue

Sociological Science, July 5, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a23

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In 1994, the publication of Herrnstein’s and Murray’s The Bell Curve resulted in a social science maelstrom of responses. In the present study, we argue that Herrnstein’s and Murray’s assertions were made prematurely, on their own terms, given the lack of data available to test the role of genotype in the dynamics of achievement and attainment in U.S. society. Today, however, the scientific community has access to at least one dataset that is nationally representative and has genome-wide molecular markers. We deploy those data from the Health and Retirement Study in order to test the core series of propositions offered by Herrnstein and Murray in 1994. First, we ask whether the effect of genotype is increasing in predictive power across birth cohorts in the middle twentieth century. Second, we ask whether assortative mating on relevant genotypes is increasing across the same time period. Finally, we ask whether educational genotypes are increasingly predictive of fertility (number ever born [NEB]) in tandem with the rising (negative) association of educational outcomes and NEB. The answers to these questions are mostly no; while molecular genetic markers can predict educational attainment, we find little evidence for the proposition that we are becoming increasingly genetically stratified.

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

Dalton Conley: Department of Sociology, Princeton University
Email: dconley@princeton.edu

Benjamin Domingue: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
Email: bdomingue@stanford.edu

Acknowledgements: Funding for this study was provided by the Russell Sage Foundation, Grant 83-15-29. This research uses data from the HRS, which is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging (Grants NIA U01AG009740, RC2AG036495, and RC4AG039029) and conducted by the University of Michigan.

Citation: Conley, Dalton, and Benjamin Domingue. 2016. “The Bell Curve Revisited: Testing Controversial Hypotheses with Molecular Genetic Data.” Sociological Science 3: 520-539.
Received: January 19, 2016
Accepted: February 22, 2016
Editors: Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a23

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).