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This study proposes and tests a novel explanation for individual variation in financial risk-taking that operates at the organizational level, namely, the role of firm compensation plans. In the course of financialization of the U.S. economy, American employers increasingly introduced new compensation plans as a labor management tool to reward, retain, and attract employees. However, these compensation plans also may have had an unintended consequence of socializing employees into financial risk-taking through exposing them to financial instruments or shaping the social meaning of money received as part of compensation above base pay. Drawing on data from a survey of employees in fourteen American companies, I show that both individual- and group-based (i.e., profit and gain sharing) bonus plans are associated with higher financial risk-taking among employees, potentially due to their social meaning of extra addendum to base earnings. In contrast, 401(k) pension plans are associated with lower levels of financial risk-taking among employees, possibly reflecting risk aversion with respect to financial security at old age. Finally, equity-sharing compensation plans (i.e., stock options, stock purchase plans, and employee stock ownership plans) show no significant associations with employees' financial risk-taking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, as Americans became increasingly involved in consumer finance, wealth inequality in the United States soared. Yet little research has examined whether and how household financial behavior is linked to wealth. Another limitation of previous scholarship is its typically fragmented focus on one aspect of financial behavior (mostly borrowing or investing). Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, this study extends prior scholarship in two primary ways: by analyzing a wide range of financial attitudes and behaviors and by examining how financial practices are related to wealth mobility, across social groups and over time. First, it identifies three distinctive patterns of use of financial products and services as well as financial prudency habits. Notably, financial practices remain stable over time. Second, household financial practices have distinctive effects on wealth mobility, above and beyond standard socioeconomic variables usually considered in the inequality literature. The financial practices of the disadvantaged result in downward wealth mobility while the financial practices of the privileged may facilitate or inhibit upward wealth mobility, depending on the nature of involvement with consumer finance. The analyses span from the 1980s, when the trends of mass-participatory finance and growing wealth inequality had just initiated, to the late 2000s, when both trends were well underway. Together, the findings provide a unique description of household financial practices in the era of mass-participatory finance and point to their role in wealth mobility processes as a new mechanism of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While previous research on the gender division of family labor consistently finds that "gender trumps money," recent studies of the gender division of parent care report a rather surprising finding -- that gender itself is trumped, though not by money but by kin relations. Arguing that most gender division of parent care takes place among brothers and sisters rather than husbands and wives, this article shifts the focus from married couples to sibling networks and examines how adult children share caring responsibilities for their parents. Using a large, nationally representative dataset, the author reports direct, indirect, and structural effects of gender on parent caregiving. First, daughters provide more care to their elder parents than sons, net of other factors. Second, daughter's caregiving appear to be more elastic than sons' with respect to constraints and resources associated with parent caregiving. Finally, not only the focal child's gender, but also his or her siblings' genders appear to be important in explaining parent caregiving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both spatial and aspatial measures of residential segregation equate spatial proximity with social distance. This assumption has been increasingly subject to critique by demographers and becomes especially problematic in historical settings. In the late 19th-century United States, standard measures suggest a counter-intuitive pattern: Southern cities, with their long history of racial inequality, had less residential segregation than urban areas considered to be more racially tolerant. Following classic accounts, we argue that traditional measures do not capture a more subtle "backyard" pattern of segregation in the South, where white families dominated front streets and blacks were relegated to alleys. We develop a sequence index that captures street-front segregation and examine its validity and reliability. Our analysis of complete household data from the 1880 Census suggests that the backyard pattern can be explained historically by the high density of the South's black population, the recency of the region's experiences with slavery, and the occupational structure of the black labor force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]