Immigrants to high-income countries often face considerable and persistent difficulties in the labour market, whereas their native-born children typically experience economic progress. However, little is known about the extent to which these immigrant–native earnings differences stem from unequal pay when doing the same work for the same employer versus labour market processes that sort immigrants into lower-paid jobs. Here, using data from nine European and North American countries, we show that the segregation of workers with immigrant backgrounds into lower-paying jobs accounts for about three-quarters of overall immigrant–native earnings differences. Although within-job pay inequality remains notable for immigrants in several countries, our results demonstrate that unequal access to higher-paying jobs is the primary driver of the immigrant–native pay gap across a range of institutionally and demographically diverse contexts. These findings highlight the importance of policies aimed at reducing between-job segregation, such as language training, job training, job search assistance programmes, improving access to domestic education, recognizing foreign qualifications, and settlement programmes aimed at enhancing access to job-relevant information and networks. Policies that target employer bias in hiring and promotion decisions are also likely to be effective, whereas measures aimed at ensuring equal pay for equal work may have more limited scope for further progress in closing the immigrant–native pay gap.

Recent studies use sibling fixed effects to estimate the influence of the family environment on children, a practice we call the ‘discordant family design’. These studies suffer from a disconnect between the use of within-family variation, on the one hand, and relevant theories which mostly refer to variation between families on the other. In addition, reverse causality, within-family confounding, selection into identification, and measurement error complicate their interpretation further. We discuss three applied examples—the effects of parenting, family income, and neighbourhood context—and provide some general guidance. To avoid misinterpretation, researchers should have a strong grasp of the variance that enters into estimation, and not just the potential confounders a given strategy is designed to deal with. 

Relative risk aversion (RRA) models explain social class inequalities in education with risk avoidance, i.e., the risky choice assumption (RCA). This assumption concerns risks related to more ambitious educational choices and has been subject to little explicit scrutiny. In this paper, we test whether or not vocational education is a safety net that protects from labor market marginalization. We present an empirical assessment of upper-secondary track choices in Sweden, contrasting the vocational and the academic tracks for those not pursuing tertiary educational degrees. We use Swedish administrative data for all siblings born 1972–1980 and fit sibling fixed effects models netting out unobserved time-constant confounders. The only evidence in favor of the RCA is that when considering selection, graduates of the academic track without a tertiary degree initially face higher risks of not being stably employed and registered as unemployed in their early 20s than their counterparts from vocational education. However, the academic tracks significantly protect men from the threat of entering unskilled routine occupations. We conclude that the support for the RCA is scant at best.

The authors use administrative data linked to parish records from northern Sweden to study how persistent inequality is across multiple generations in education, occupation, and wealth, going from historical to contemporary time. The data cover seven generations and allow the authors to follow ancestors of individuals living in Sweden around the new millennium back more than 200 years, covering the mid-18th century to the 21st century. In a sample of around 75,000 traceable descendants, they analyze (a) up to fifth cousin correlations and (b) dynastic correlations over seven generations based on aggregations of ancestors’ social class/status. With both approaches, the authors find that past generations structure life chances many generations later, even though the results align with traditional stratification research in that mobility across multiple generations is high. The results imply that today’s inequality regime may have been formed many generations back.

Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of countries. Here, using recent linked employer–employee data from 15 countries, we show that the processes sorting people into different jobs account for substantially less of the gender pay differences than was previously believed and that within-job pay differences remain consequential.

Objective: We examine whether parental death differentially affects educational and occupational attainment by the socioeconomic status of the parent who dies and the socioeconomic status of the surviving parent and extended kin.

Background: An extensive literature has explored the main effect of parental death on offspring attainment, but few studies have examined socioeconomic differentials in the impact of parental death. Understanding the potential role of socioeconomic resources in compensating for disadvantage is important for understanding whether parental death, and disadvantageous events more generally, have an equalizing or exacerbating effect on socioeconomic differences in offspring socioeconomic attainment.

Method: Using Swedish population register data on cohorts born 1973—1982 we examine grade point average at age 16, the transition from lower to upper-secondary education, the transition to tertiary education, overall educational attainment, and occupational status by age 30. We match families using antemortem parental socioeconomic trajectories. We also employ sibling fixed effects models.

Results: We observe inconsistent results in our between-family regression analyses adjusting for observables. In sibling fixed effects models, we see zero results for moderation by parents’ occupations.

Conclusion: We find little clear or convincing evidence that there are socioeconomic differentials in the impact of parental death in Sweden.​

Implications: The Swedish welfare state may reduce socioeconomic differentials in the impact of parental death. However, the lack of socioeconomic variation may also be influenced by factors such as compensatory agency.

The upswing in finance in recent decades has led to rising inequality, but do downswings in finance lead to a symmetric decline in inequality? We analyze the asymmetry of the effect of ups and downs in finance, and the effect of increased capital requirements and the bonus cap on national earnings inequality. We use administrative employer–employee-linked data from 1990 to 2019 for 12 countries and data from bank reports, from 2009 to 2017 in 13 European countries. We find a strong asymmetry in the effect of upswings and downswings in finance on earnings inequality, a weak, if any, mitigating effect of capital requirements on finance’s contribution to inequality, and a restructuring but no absolute effect of the bonus cap on financiers’ earnings. We suggest that while rising financiers’ wages increase inequality in upswings, they are resilient in downswings and thus downswings do not contribute to a symmetric decline in inequality. 

We test a prediction of cumulative advantage theory about enduring life cycle effects of educational mobility on earnings. We identify four mobility groups by cross-classifying parental education (degree/no degree) by their offspring (degree/no degree) and study the long-term economic consequences of intergenerational educational mobility. Data for this study come from Swedish population registers covering birth cohorts between 1953 and 1955. We analyse earnings trajectories of Swedish men and women, in each educational mobility category, over most of their working-age life course. We find that the earnings trajectories cluster in two groups that reflect each’s educational destination, not their educational origin. These results suggest that mobility trajectories in the Swedish labour market do not follow any strong advantage pattern but instead are explained by the attainment of human capital. By contrast, complementary analyses of mid-life wealth, not necessarily derived in the labour market, suggest more support for cumulative advantage since those with high-educated parents have much higher levels of wealth. We argue that these contrasting results, between earnings and wealth, highlight the Swedish welfare regime’s effectiveness, particularly in regulating and suppressing inequality in the labour market.

Recent scholarship on mobility has increasingly incorporated wealth. We ask if wealth brings anything new to mobility research or is just a standard socioeconomic status (SES) dimension in disguise. We exploit Swedish administrative registers, which contain rich SES measures over individuals' lives for both parents' and children's generations. Using sibling correlations to estimate a baseline of shared family background influence, we then perform a total decomposition for each SES dimension and their overlaps. We find that wealth is a distinct dimension of SES that is very different from education, occupation, and income. Parental wealth cannot be substituted for other SES dimensions in understanding child's wealth attainment. Moreover, parental wealth substantially moderates intergenerational reproduction in other dimensions: The wealthiest have higher reproduction rates in all child outcomes, but in particular for children's income and wealth. Excluding wealth leads to underestimating intergenerational inequality, aggravated by its qualitatively unique status as an SES resource. We conclude that-alongside the SES resources education, occupation, and income-wealth emerges as an integral and unique dimension of what we choose to call the big four of social stratification.

A foundational claim in social stratification research is that occupational hierarchies are largely invariant across societies, a phenomenon known as the Treiman constant. However, recent research in social stratification has focused on the role of local social spaces in generating inequalities, casting doubt on the validity of the idea of a universally invariant occupational hierarchy. In this paper, we focus on organizations as a local space in which occupational hierarchies may vary. We ask three questions: (1) do occupational hierarchies vary across workplaces, (2) why do occupational hierarchies vary across workplaces, and (3) what can explain why some occupations move up or down the occupational hierarchy in specific workplace contexts? Using novel administrative data from Sweden we measure and model the correlation between a workplace's occupational hierarchy and the national occupational hierarchy, finding substantial variation across workplaces in the matching of a given workplace's hierarchy to the national hierarchy. We then develop a set of contextual and relational variables at the organizational level to potentially explain this variation, as well as to explain which occupations move up or down the workplace hierarchy. This paper points toward an important and novel empirical finding - variation across workplaces in occupational hierarchies - both confirming the power of the Treiman constant while opening up avenues to explore deviations from it. It also reveals the need to develop theories than can explain this workplace-level variation.