Who's up and who's down
Only 15 Minutes? The Social Stratification of Fame in Printed Media
Arnout van de Rijt et al.
American Sociological Review, April 2013, Pages 266-289
Abstract:
Contemporary scholarship has conceptualized modern fame as an open system in which people continually move in and out of celebrity status. This model stands in stark contrast to the traditional notion in the sociology of stratification that depicts stable hierarchies sustained through classic forces such as social structure and cumulative advantage. We investigate the mobility of fame using a unique data source containing daily records of references to person names in a large corpus of English-language media sources. These data reveal that only at the bottom of the public attention hierarchy do names exhibit fast turnover; at upper tiers, stable coverage persists around a fixed level and rank for decades. Fame exhibits strong continuity even in entertainment, on television, and on blogs, where it has been thought to be most ephemeral. We conclude that once a person's name is decoupled from the initial event that lent it momentary attention, self-reinforcing processes, career structures, and commemorative practices perpetuate fame.
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Relative Status and Well-Being: Evidence from U.S. Suicide Deaths
Mary Daly, Daniel Wilson & Norman Johnson
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We assess the importance of interpersonal income comparisons using data on suicide deaths. We examine whether suicide risk is related to others' income, holding own income and other individual and environmental factors fixed. We estimate models of the suicide hazard using two independent data sets: (1) the National Longitudinal Mortality Study and (2) the National Center for Health Statistics' Multiple Cause of Death Files combined with the 5 percent Public Use Micro Sample of the 1990 decennial census. Results from both data sources show that, controlling for own income and individual characteristics, individual suicide risk rises with others' income.
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Jennifer Marr & Stefan Thau
Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate how initial status position influences the quality of task performance in the aftermath of status loss. We argue that despite the benefits of having status, high-status individuals experience more self-threat and, consequently, have more difficulty performing well after status loss than do low-status individuals who experience a comparable loss of status. In a field study of professional baseball players (Study 1), we found that while low-status players' performance quality was unaffected by status loss, the quality of high-status players' performance declined significantly after losing status. In a high-involvement group experiment (Study 2) we found that high-status individuals who lost status were less proficient than both high-status individuals who did not lose status, and low-status individuals who lost a comparable amount of status. However, supporting the proposed self-threat mediation, self-affirmation restored the quality of high-status individuals' performance (Study 3). We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of these findings.
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Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket: Life-History Strategies, Bet Hedging, and Diversification
Andrew Edward White et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Diversification of resources is a strategy found everywhere from the level of microorganisms to that of giant Wall Street investment firms. We examine the functional nature of diversification using life-history theory - a framework for understanding how organisms navigate resource-allocation trade-offs. This framework suggests that diversification may be adaptive or maladaptive depending on one's life-history strategy and that these differences should be observed under conditions of threat. In three studies, we found that cues of mortality threat interact with one index of life-history strategy, childhood socioeconomic status (SES), to affect diversification. Among those from low-SES backgrounds, mortality threat increased preferences for diversification. However, among those from high-SES backgrounds, mortality threat had the opposite effect, inclining people to put all their eggs in one basket. The same interaction pattern emerged with a potential biomarker of life-history strategy, oxidative stress. These findings highlight when, and for whom, different diversification strategies can be advantageous.
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It's Good to Be the King: Neurobiological Benefits of Higher Social Standing
Modupe Akinola & Wendy Berry Mendes
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Epidemiological and animal studies often find that higher social status is associated with better physical health outcomes, but these findings are by design correlational and lack mediational explanations. In two studies, we examine neurobiological reactivity to test the hypothesis that higher social status leads to salutary short-term psychological, physiological, and behavioral responses. In Study 1, we measured police officers' subjective social status and had them engage in a stressful task during which we measured cardiovascular and neuroendocrine reactivity. In Study 2, we manipulated social status and examined physiological reactivity and performance outcomes to explore links among status, performance, and physiological reactivity. Results indicated that higher social status (whether measured or manipulated) was associated with approach-oriented physiology (Studies 1 and 2) and better performance (Study 2) relative to lower status. These findings point to acute reactivity as one possible causal mechanism to better physical health among those higher in social status.
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Rebecca Diamond
Harvard Working Paper, December 2012
Abstract:
From 1980 to 2000, the substantial rise in the U.S. college-high school graduate wage gap coincided with an increase in geographic sorting as college graduates increasingly concentrated in high wage, high rent metropolitan areas, relative to lower skill workers. The increase in wage inequality may not reflect a similar increase in well-being inequality because high and low skill workers increasingly paid different housing costs and consumed different local amenities. This paper examines the determinants and welfare implications of the increased geographic skill sorting. I estimate a structural spatial equilibrium model of local labor demand, housing supply, labor supply, and amenity levels. The model allows local amenity and productivity levels to endogenously respond to a city's skill-mix. I identify the model parameters using local labor demand changes driven by variation in cities' industry mixes and interactions of these labor demand shocks with determinants of housing supply (land use regulations and land availability). The GMM estimates indicate that cross-city changes in firms' demands for high and low skill labor were the underlying forces of the increase in geographic skill sorting. An increase in labor demand for college relative to non-college workers increases a city's college employment share, which then endogenously raises the local productivity of all workers and improves local amenities. Local wage and amenity growth generates in-migration, driving up rents. My estimates show that low skill workers are less willing to pay high housing costs to live in high-amenity cities, leading them to elect more affordable, low-amenity cities. I find that the combined effects of changes in cities' wages, rents, and endogenous amenities increased well-being inequality between high school and college graduates by a significantly larger amount than would be suggested by the increase in the college wage gap alone.
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Just Luck: An Experimental Study of Risk Taking and Fairness
Alexander Cappelen et al.
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Choices involving risk significantly affect the distribution of income and wealth in society. This paper reports the results of the first experiment, to our knowledge, to study fairness views about risk-taking, specifically whether such views are based chiefly on ex ante opportunities or on ex post outcomes. We find that, even though many participants focus exclusively on ex ante opportunities, most favor some redistribution ex post. Many participants also make a distinction between ex post inequalities that reflect differences in luck and ex post inequalities that reflect differences in choices. These findings apply to both stakeholders and impartial spectators.
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Rising Top Incomes Do Not Raise the Tide
Dierk Herzer & Sebastian Vollmer
Journal of Policy Modeling, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the long-run relationship between top income shares and economic growth for a panel of nine high-income countries over the period from 1961 to 1996. We use panel cointegration and causality techniquesthat are robust to omitted variables, slope heterogeneity, and endogenous variables. Our main findings are that an increase in the top decile of income share reduces growth, and that long-run causality also runs in the opposite direction - from economic growth to top income shares.
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Exporting, Skills and Wage Inequality
Michael Klein, Christoph Moser & Dieter Urban
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
International trade has been cited as a source of widening wage inequality in industrial nations. Most previous empirical evidence supports this claim by showing an effect in which increasing exports tilt demand towards firms which export and employ a relatively large proportion of higher-skilled workers from the group of firms which do not export. We find that, in addition to this, there is also an effect whereby, among exporting firms, there is a significant wage premium for high-skilled workers and a wage discount for low-skilled workers. These estimates are based on a matched employer-employee data set of western German manufacturing firms over the period 1993 - 2007. Our estimates suggest that export activity can be associated with up to 30 percent of within and between skill group wage inequality.
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Jeff Larrimore
Review of Income and Wealth, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a shift-share analysis on March CPS data, this paper estimates the degree to which changes in labor earnings, employment, and marriage patterns account for household income inequality growth in the United States since 1979. The factors contributing to the rapid rise in income inequality in the 1980s differ substantially from those contributing to its slower increase since that time. Unlike findings for the 1980s when changes in the correlation of spouses' earnings accounted for income inequality growth, this factor is no longer a major contributor toward its continued increase. Additionally, the 2000s business cycle is the first full business cycle in at least 30 years where changes in earnings of male household heads accounted for declines in income inequality. Instead, the continued growth in income inequality in the 2000s was accounted for primarily by increases in female earnings inequality and declines in both male and female employment.
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A New Model of Social Class: Findings from the BBC's Great British Class Survey Experiment
Mike Savage et al.
Sociology, April 2013, Pages 219-250
Abstract:
The social scientific analysis of social class is attracting renewed interest given the accentuation of economic and social inequalities throughout the world. The most widely validated measure of social class, the Nuffield class schema, developed in the 1970s, was codified in the UK's National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) and places people in one of seven main classes according to their occupation and employment status. This principally distinguishes between people working in routine or semi-routine occupations employed on a ‘labour contract' on the one hand, and those working in professional or managerial occupations employed on a ‘service contract' on the other. However, this occupationally based class schema does not effectively capture the role of social and cultural processes in generating class divisions. We analyse the largest survey of social class ever conducted in the UK, the BBC's 2011 Great British Class Survey, with 161,400 web respondents, as well as a nationally representative sample survey, which includes unusually detailed questions asked on social, cultural and economic capital. Using latent class analysis on these variables, we derive seven classes. We demonstrate the existence of an ‘elite', whose wealth separates them from an established middle class, as well as a class of technical experts and a class of ‘new affluent' workers. We also show that at the lower levels of the class structure, alongside an ageing traditional working class, there is a ‘precariat' characterised by very low levels of capital, and a group of emergent service workers. We think that this new seven class model recognises both social polarisation in British society and class fragmentation in its middle layers, and will attract enormous interest from a wide social scientific community in offering an up-to-date multi-dimensional model of social class.
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Bruno Frey et al.
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: Do employees care about their relative (economic) position in comparison to their co-workers in an organization? And if so, does it raise or lower their performance? While the topic is widely discussed in the literature, behavioral evidence on these important questions is relatively rare.
Methods: This article explores the pay-performance relationship using a sports data set. The strength of analyzing such data is that sports tournaments take place in a very controlled environment that helps to isolate a relative income effect.
Results: Using two large unique data sets that cover 26 seasons in basketball and eight seasons in soccer (Bundesliga), we find considerable support for the idea that a relative income disadvantage is correlated with a decrease in individual performance. In addition, there does not seem to be any tolerance for income disparity based on the hope that such differences may signal that better times are ahead.
Conclusions: This suggests the need to consider the impact of the relative income position when designing pay-for-performance mechanisms within firms and teams.
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Are egalitarian preferences based on envy?
Simon Kemp & AndFriedel Bolle
Journal of Socio-Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated whether preferences for living in a society with equal (or unequal) incomes were related to individual differences in how envious people were. Four studies measured dispositional envy with a scale developed by Smith et al. (1999). The first study showed that dispositional envy correlated quite strongly with individual's ratings of how much they would envy another's success for a number of different objects of envy. Studies 2, 3 and 4 found little correlation between dispositional envy and rated preferences for living in a society with more equal incomes for five scenarios which were predicted to be productive of envy for samples of New Zealand students, East German students, and New Zealand general public respectively. Study 3 also found a similar result for an experiment in which distribution decisions implied corresponding money transfers to the participants. Overall, the four studies indicate that individual differences in envy are only weak predictors of preferences for egalitarian income distributions.
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Daniel Potter & Josipa Roksa
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Children from different family backgrounds enter schooling with different levels of academic skills, and those differences grow over time. What explains this growing inequality? While the social reproduction tradition has argued that family contexts are central to producing class gaps in academic achievement, recent quantitative studies have found that family experiences explain only a small portion of those inequalities. We propose that resolving this inconsistency requires developing a new measure of family experiences that captures the continuity of exposure over time and thus more closely reflects the logic of the social reproduction tradition. Results from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K) show that, consistent with previous quantitative research, time-specific measures of family experiences have little explanatory power. However, cumulative family experiences account for most of the growing inequality in academic achievement between children from different social class backgrounds over time. These findings support claims from the social reproduction tradition, and inform more broadly the understanding of how family experiences contribute to social inequality.
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Jo Blanden et al.
Review of Income and Wealth, forthcoming
Abstract:
We build on cross-national research to examine the relationships underlying estimates of relative intergenerational mobility in the United States and Great Britain using harmonized longitudinal data and focusing on men. We examine several pathways by which parental status is related to offspring status, including education, labor market attachment, occupation, marital status, and health, and perform several sensitivity analyses to test the robustness of our results. We decompose differences between the two nations into that part attributable to the strength of the relationship between parental income and the child's characteristics and the labor market return to those child characteristics. We find that the relationships underlying these intergenerational linkages differ in systematic ways between the two nations. In the United States, primarily because of the higher returns to education and skills, the pathway through offspring education is relatively more important than it is in Great Britain; by contrast, in Great Britain the occupation pathway forms the primary channel of intergenerational persistence.
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Philipp Bauer & Regina Riphahn
Labour Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use census data on 26 Swiss cantons to determine the association of educational institutions with the intergenerational transmission of education. We test whether education transmission is higher when children enter kindergarten and school earlier and when tracking occurs at a later age. In contrast to the literature we consider the three institutions jointly. Our results generally confirm the expected correlation patterns. Among second generation immigrants, the age at enrollment in kindergarten is most closely associated with educational mobility. Among natives, late tracking is most strongly and positively associated with educational mobility. Our results are robust to various alternative specifications.
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Educational expectation trajectories and attainment in the transition to adulthood
Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson & John Reynolds
Social Science Research, May 2013, Pages 818-835
Abstract:
How consequential is family socioeconomic status for maintaining plans to get a bachelor's degree during the transition to adulthood? This article examines persistence and change in educational expectations, focusing on the extent to which family socioeconomic status shapes overtime trajectories of bachelor's degree expectations, how the influence involves the timing of family formation and full-time work vs. college attendance, and how persistence in expectations is consequential for getting a 4-year degree. The findings, based on the high school senior classes of 1987-1990, demonstrate that adolescents from higher socioeconomic status families are much more likely to hold onto their expectations to earn 4-year degrees, both in the early years after high school and, for those who do not earn degrees within that period, on through their 20s. These more persistent expectations in young adulthood, more so than adolescent expectations, help explain the greater success of young people from higher socioeconomic status backgrounds in earning a 4-year degree. Persistence of expectations to earn a bachelor's degree in the years after high school is shaped by stratified pathways of school, work, and family roles in the transition to adulthood.
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Choices Chance and Change: Luck Egalitarianism Over Time
Patrick Tomlin
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, April 2013, Pages 393-407
Abstract:
The family of theories dubbed ‘luck egalitarianism' represent an attempt to infuse egalitarian thinking with a concern for personal responsibility, arguing that inequalities are just when they result from, or the extent to which they result from, choice, but are unjust when they result from, or the extent to which they result from, luck. In this essay I argue that luck egalitarians should sometimes seek to limit inequalities, even when they have a fully choice-based pedigree (i.e., result only from the choices of agents). I grant that the broad approach is correct but argue that the temporal standpoint from which we judge whether the person can be held responsible, or the extent to which they can be held responsible, should be radically altered. Instead of asking, as Standard (or Static) Luck Egalitarianism seems to, whether or not, or to what extent, a person was responsible for the choice at the time of choosing, and asking the question of responsibility only once, we should ask whether, or to what extent, they are responsible for the choice at the point at which we are seeking to discover whether, or to what extent, the inequality is just, and so the question of responsibility is not settled but constantly under review. Such an approach will differ from Standard Luck Egalitarianism only if responsibility for a choice is not set in stone - if responsibility can weaken then we should not see the boundary between luck and responsibility within a particular action as static. Drawing on Derek Parfit's illuminating discussions of personal identity, and contemporary literature on moral responsibility, I suggest there are good reasons to think that responsibility can weaken - that we are not necessarily fully responsible for a choice for ever, even if we were fully responsible at the time of choosing. I call the variant of luck egalitarianism that recognises this shift in temporal standpoint and that responsibility can weaken Dynamic Luck Egalitarianism (DLE). In conclusion I offer a preliminary discussion of what kind of policies DLE would support.
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The effect of spatial elevation on respect depends on merit and medium
Lisa Schubert, Thomas Schubert & Sascha Topolinski
Social Psychology, Spring 2013, Pages 147-159
Abstract:
Five experiments investigated the effects of spatial elevation on person perception in both a computer setup and actual encounters, determining the moderating role of additional verbal information about the target. In accordance with prior findings, spatial elevation increased respect in a computer setting, especially when the target was described as nonachieving. Liking toward the target was not affected. In an actual encounter the results were reversed: When actually facing the target, spatial elevation decreased respect when it was not legitimized by achievements of the target. We discuss the implications of our findings for the elicitation of respect and experimental approaches to investigate it.
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How Growing Asset Inequality Affects Developing Economies
Hamid Beladi, Chi-Chur Chao & Daniel Hollas
Journal of Economics and Business, July-August 2013, Pages 43-51
Abstract:
Using a dual structure depicting a developing economy, this paper shows that an increase in asset inequality can lead to wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labor. In addition, increasing asset inequality raises the luxury goods price and hence the unemployment ratio. These effects lower the social welfare of the economy. To mitigate the adverse effect on wage inequality by asset inequality, a policy option to increase the urban minimum wage rate can be considered. However, this wage policy worsens social welfare by generating higher urban unemployment in the economy.
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Intersecting Cultural Beliefs in Social Relations: Gender, Race, and Class Binds and Freedoms
Cecilia Ridgeway & Tamar Kricheli-Katz
Gender & Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
We develop an evidence-based theoretical account of how widely shared cultural beliefs about gender, race, and class intersect in interpersonal and other social relational contexts in the United States to create characteristic cultural "binds" and freedoms for actors in those contexts. We treat gender, race, and class as systems of inequality that are culturally constructed as distinct but implicitly overlap through their defining beliefs, which reflect the perspectives of dominant groups in society. We cite evidence for the contextually contingent interactional "binds" and freedoms this creates for people such as Asian men, Black women, and poor whites who are not prototypical of images embedded in cultural gender, race, and class beliefs. All forms of unprototypicality create "binds," but freedoms result from being unprototypical of disadvantaging rather than advantaging statuses.
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Mario Lucchini, Sara Della Bella & Maurizio Pisati
European Sociological Review, April 2013, Pages 289-301
Abstract:
The standard sociological approach to the study of social stratification and mobility fails to take due account of the role played by the genetic confounders which, as emerges from other fields of research, condition the processes by which inequalities are transmitted and structured. For over a century, behavioural genetics has shown that a significant proportion of cognitive abilities and personality characteristics that play important roles in the status attainment process are traits largely structured on genetic bases. We shall therefore argue that theories and methods deriving from behavioural genetics can enhance our understanding of the processes by which inequalities are shaped and transmitted, and that more sophisticated models should be developed to measure social gradients controlling for distal non-observable causal antecedents, like genes and every environmental characteristic that we are not able to observe. In this article, using Italian family data taken from the sample survey Multiscopo Istat ‘Aspetti della Vita Quotidiana', we decompose the variance of educational attainment into a genetic and an environmental component. We obtain a heritability estimate of 0.50 for females and 0.52 for males, meaning that about 50 per cent of the differences observed in educational attainment are statistically ‘explained' by differences in genotypes. This result induces us to state that the traditional sociological theories used to explain individual differences in educational achievement may not be the best ones, and that it is crucial to consider both genetic and environmental influences when studying social behaviours.
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Inequality and happiness: When perceived social mobility and economic reality do not match
Christian Bjørnskov et al.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
We argue that perceived fairness of the income generation process affects the association between income inequality and subjective well-being, and that there are systematic differences in this regard between countries that are characterized by a high or, respectively, low level of actual fairness. Using a simple model of individual labor market participation under uncertainty, we predict that high levels of perceived fairness cause higher levels of individual welfare, and lower support for income redistribution. Income inequality is predicted to have a more favorable impact on subjective well-being for individuals with high fairness perceptions. This relationship is predicted to be stronger in societies that are characterized by low actual fairness. Using data on subjective well-being and a broad set of fairness measures from a pseudo micro-panel from the WVS over the 1990-2008 period, we find strong support for the negative (positive) association between fairness perceptions and the demand for more equal incomes (subjective well-being). We also find strong empirical support for the predicted differences in individual tolerance for income inequality, and the predicted influence of actual fairness.
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The Interaction between Human and Physical Capital Accumulation and the Growth-Inequality Trade-off
Stephen Turnovsky & Aditi Mitra
Journal of Human Capital, Spring 2013, Pages 26-75
Abstract:
This paper analyzes the effects of technological change on growth and inequality in a two-sector economy. The key mechanism is the evolution of the differential rates of return to human relative to physical capital as they respond to the changing technology. Productivity enhancement in the human capital sector increases the growth rate permanently, but in the final output sector, it has only a temporary effect. The effects on inequality depend on (i) the underlying source of inequality and (ii) the time horizon over which the productivity increase occurs. The model can generate growth-inequality relationships consistent with the empirical evidence.