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U.S. studies have found that stratified graduate education accounts for most of the relatively strong intergenerational socioeconomic association among postgraduate degree holders. The same association has been observed, but not explained, in countries with higher education systems that differ from that of the United States. We explore the mediation role of undergraduate- and graduate-level stratification in accounting for the intergenerational occupational association among postgraduate degree holders in the United Kingdom. We find that the unequal distribution of undergraduate-level education and path dependency between undergraduate- and graduate-level stratification help to give rise to an unequal occupational outcome by social origin among postgraduate degree holders. We explain this by the tight coupling of undergraduate and graduate education in the United Kingdom. Our analysis also illustrates the need to go beyond graduate education in understanding social origin inequality among postgraduate degree holders to examine the role of undergraduate education and how it is linked to graduate education.

We propose a novel way of estimating direct and indirect causal effects for panel data. Our method applies when the treatment and the mediator can be coded as binary variables. We exploit pre-treatment and pre-mediator differences in outcomes between the mediated and non-mediated groups within the treated units. Our method is applicable when the mediator is realized both before and after treatment or when it is only a consequence of the treatment. We apply our method to the New Jersey minimum wage policy data and show that a minimal effect on overall employment is mediated through part-time employment.

Many studies have focused on how demographic dynamics, such as changes in marriage patterns and the increasing share of households headed by a single adult, may contribute to rising earnings inequality. Here we instead ask how demographic differences between countries may underpin differences in household earnings inequality between them, concentrating on economic homogamy and the proportion of households headed by a single woman and by a single man. We use data on 28 OECD countries from the 2016 wave of the Luxembourg Income Study, and develop a new inequality decomposition approach based on half the squared coefficient of variation (HSCV). We find that variation between countries in the specified demographic factors can account for just over 40% of the variation between countries in inequality in household labour earnings, with the proportion of households headed by a single woman playing the largest role. The associations between labour earnings inequality and these demographic components are consistent across countries, with little variation in how each is related to overall inequality. Although by far the largest driver of cross-national inequality relates to the earnings of partnered men, counterfactual analysis suggests that relatively small changes in these demographic variables can indeed affect inequality.

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey and focusing on women who became mothers between 1995 and 2005, we estimate the motherhood penalty for women’s own earnings and for the total income of their household: that is, we consider the extent to which motherhood carries a penalty not only for a mother but also for her family. We adopt an approach that differs from those previously employed in research on motherhood penalties: we follow Hernán and Robins, setting up our data as a ‘target trial’, and we analyse it using the Individual Synthetic Control method, based on the Synthetic Control approach of Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller. We find considerable variation in the effect of motherhood on British women’s earnings, but the median penalty is a reduction in medium- and long-term earnings by about 45 per cent relative to what women would have earned if they had remained childless. Motherhood has no effect on average on the income of the woman’s household, but has substantial negative effects for some households. Focusing on both individual and household penalties yields a more complete picture of the distributional consequences of motherhood than hitherto.

BACKGROUND By their nature, the impact of epidemics on mortality varies geographically, suggesting that the geographical impact of an epidemic implies a social impact OBJECTIVE To examine the association between two measures of the social composition of a local area and age- and sex-standardised Covid-19 and other mortality in the period 1 March to 31 July 2020 The measures are how deprived an area is and what proportion of its population is non-white METHODS Using spatial autoregressive regression we analyse geographical variation in age- and sex-standardised Covid-19 mortality among English local authorities between 1 March and 31 July 2020 in relation to measures of social composition, and we compare it with mortality from non-Covid sources in the same period, and with all-causes mortality in 2018 RESULTS Areas with higher social deprivation have a higher Covid-19 mortality rate, but the association is much weaker than between social deprivation and mortality rates more generally An area's proportion non-white has a strong positive association with Covid-19 mortality, in contrast to a negative association with 2020 non-Covid and with 2018 mortality CONCLUSIONS Covid-19 mortality is related to the social composition of areas in different ways than current non-Covid mortality or past mortality CONTRIBUTION The paper provides the first demonstration of the distinct distributional impact of mortality in relation to the Covid-19 vims by the social composition of areas in England

BACKGROUND Conventional studies of intergenerational social reproduction are based on a retrospective design, sampling adults and linking their status to that of their parents. This approach yields conditional estimates of intergenerational relationships. Recent studies have taken a prospective approach, following a birth cohort forward to examine how it is socially reproduced. This permits the estimation of relationships of social reproduction that do not condition on the existence of at least one child. OBJECTIVE We examine whether the relationship between conditional and unconditional estimates found for the United States and Great Britain also holds for a diverse range of European countries. METHODS We examine educational reproduction among men and women born 1930-1950 in 12 countries using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and compare unconditional and conditional estimates. RESULTS We find striking similarities in the relationship between unconditional and conditional estimates throughout Europe. Among women, the difference between conditional and unconditional estimates generally increased with education. Women with more education were less likely to reproduce themselves educationally because they were less likely to marry. The educational gradient, in terms of the probability of having a child who attained a tertiary degree, was more pronounced in the South and East of Europe than in the North and West. CONCLUSIONS The gap between conditional and unconditional estimates indicates that the more common retrospective approach tends to overstate the extent of educational reproduction. CONTRIBUTION This is the first comparative study adopting a prospective approach to intergenerational social reproduction. Funding Agencies|John Fell Oxford University Press (OUP) Research Fund; Swedish Research CouncilSwedish Research Council [DNR 445-2013-7681, DNR 340-2013-5460]; European CommissionEuropean Commission Joint Research Centre [QLK6-CT-2001-00360, SHARE-I3: RII-CT-2006-062193, COMPARE: CIT5-CT-2005-028857, SHARELIFE: CIT4-CT-2006-028812, 211909, 227822, 261982]; German Ministry of Education and ResearchFederal Ministry of Education & Research (BMBF); Max Planck SocietyMax Planck SocietyFoundation CELLEX; US National Institute on AgingUnited States Department of Health & Human ServicesNational Institutes of Health (NIH) - USANIH National Institute on Aging (NIA) [U01_AG09740-13S2, P01_AG005842, P01_AG08291, P30_AG12815, R21_AG025169, Y1-AG-4553-01, IAG_BSR06-11, OGHA_04-064, HHSN271201300071C]

Over the last decades, various policies at national and local levels have been implemented to widen participation in higher education (HE) in Scotland and more widely in the UK. Despite this, the acquisition of a HE qualification is still largely determined by the family in which individuals are born. Our study provides new evidence on the extent to which family factors matter by examining sibling data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS), a large-scale linkage study created using data from administrative and statistical sources. Random effects linear probability models are used to analyse individual- and family-level variance in the chances of obtaining a HE qualification. Our results show that about 40% of the variation in the chances of attaining a university degree is explained by siblings’ shared family characteristics and about a third of this share is explained by parental social class, education and housing tenure. A high degree of sibling similarity in the outcome was found across all social-origin classes. However, while siblings of advantaged families are alike because they both graduated from higher education, siblings of disadvantaged families are alike because neither of them did. We suggest that parental compensatory strategies in the former families and economic constraints in the latter families may explain such stark patterns of inequality. Finally, we do not find evidence that the availability of sub-degrees makes a difference to these patterns.

The application of polygenic scores has transformed our ability to investigate whether and how genetic and environmental factors jointly contribute to the variation of complex traits. Modelling the complex interplay between genes and environment, however, raises serious methodological challenges. Here we illustrate the largely unrecognised impact of gene-environment dependencies on the identification of the effects of genes and their variation across environments. We show that controlling for heritable covariates in regression models that include polygenic scores as independent variables introduces endogenous selection bias when one or more of these covariates depends on unmeasured factors that also affect the outcome. This results in the problem of conditioning on a collider, which in turn leads to spurious associations and effect sizes. Using graphical and simulation methods we demonstrate that the degree of bias depends on the strength of the gene-covariate correlation and of hidden heterogeneity linking covariates with outcomes, regardless of whether the main analytic focus is mediation, confounding, or gene × covariate (commonly gene × environment) interactions. We offer potential solutions, highlighting the importance of causal inference. We also urge further caution when fitting and interpreting models with polygenic scores and non-exogenous environments or phenotypes and demonstrate how spurious associations are likely to arise, advancing our understanding of such results.

In Ireland, the term "family farm" is synonymous with the term "farm" itself, since the degree of penetration of agriculture by commercial interests or "agribusiness" remains relatively small. Broadly speaking, there are three overlapping dimensions along which important distinctions between family farms occur in Ireland. These are farm size, the regional location of the farm, and the type of farming carried out. This chapter begins with a broad review of historical changes in the pattern of Irish family farming. It examines the role of government and European Economic Community policy in bringing about these changes. The chapter also examines some of the effects of these changes on the economic and social structure and environment of rural Ireland. It discusses the prospects for the different kinds of family farm in Ireland today. The majority of family farmers in Ireland today, therefore, hold a rather marginal position within the economy, being extremely unlikely to reproduce themselves.

Physical social interaction relevant to the spread of infectious diseases occurs, by its nature, at a local level. If infection and related mortality are associated with social background, it is therefore natural to study variation in them in relation to the social composition of local areas. The first part of the paper studies the geographical impact of Covid-19 infection on age-standardised sex-specific excess death rates during the peak months of the pandemic so far, March through May 2020. The second part examines monthly mortality dynamics in relation to predictions from a spatial SIR (Susceptible, Infected, Recovered) model of infection introduced by Bisin and Moro (2020). The analysis indicates that during the peak months of the Covid-19 pandemic, a larger non-white population and higher social deprivation in an area were associated with higher excess mortality, particularly among men. Regarding dynamics, higher population density accelerated the growth in mortality during the upsurge in infection and increased its rate of decline after the peak of the epidemic, thereby producing a more peaked mortality profile. There is also evidence of a slower post-peak decline in mortality in more socially deprived areas but a more rapid decline in areas with a larger non-white population.

The analysis in this paper uses the new Understanding Society COVID-19 survey. The key advantage of these data is that they allow us to examine infection rates for people with particular characteristics. We study how reported symptoms vary in the population and relate reported symptoms to a positive Covid-19 test in the small sample in the survey who were tested. Combining these probabilities we find that the chances of infection increase with a person’s education level, are lower and declining with age among those aged over 55, and were higher in the West Midlands and London and lower in the North East than in the rest of the country, and tended to increase with regional population density. There is also evidence that the infection rate was lower among those of a Caribbean origin. A suitably cautious estimate of the mean infection rate is that, during the period up to the end of April 2020, it was between 2% and 8%, with a central rate of about 5%.

This volume examines the role of education in shaping rates and patterns of intergenerational social mobility among men and women during the twentieth century. Focusing on the relationship between a person's social class and the social class of his or her parents, each chapter looks at a different country—the United States, Sweden, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. Contributors examine change in absolute and relative mobility and in education across birth cohorts born between the first decade of the twentieth century and the early 1970s. They find a striking similarity in trends across all countries, and in particular a contrast between the fortunes of people born before the 1950s, those who enjoyed increasing rates of upward mobility and a decline in the strength of the link between class origins and destinations, and later generations who experienced more downward mobility and little change in how origins and destinations are linked. This volume uncovers the factors that drove these shifts, revealing education as significant in promoting social openness. It will be an invaluable source for anyone who wants to understand the evolution of mobility and inequality in the contemporary world.

Adult children’s labor market status and their type of marriage are major channels through which family advantages are passed from one generation to the next. However, these two routes are seldom studied together. We develop a theoretical approach to incorporate marriage entry and marital sorting into the intergenerational transmission of family income, accounting for differences between sons and daughters and considering education as a central explanatory factor. Using a novel decomposition method applied to data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that marriage plays a major role in intergenerational transmission only among daughters and not until they reach their late-30s. This is more salient in the recent cohort in our data (people born 1963 to 1975). Marital status and marital sorting are comparably important in accounting for the role of marriage, but sorting becomes more important over cohorts. The increasing earnings returns to education over a husband’s career and the weakening association between parental income and daughter’s own earnings explain why marital sorting, and marriage overall, have been growing more important for intergenerational transmission from parents to their daughters.

Sweden was renowned for attempting a “middle way” between capitalism and socialism, with a market economy combined with ambitious policies for equalizing both opportunities and living conditions. Did this facilitate social mobility, and was equalization of educational attainment the mechanism behind it? We document increasing social mobility during a period of strong growth of higher class occupations, both for men and women, an increase that, however, tends to level off for cohorts born in the mid-1960s. We also verify that most of this development into a more socially open society was due to the equalization of educational outcomes. However, the very substantial growth of upper secondary and tertiary education also contributed, because this expansion meant that more people in younger cohorts received higher education where, in Sweden, the importance of social origin for class destinations is considerably weaker than at lower levels of education.

Summarizing the findings of the country chapters, this chapter addresses the question: How did intergenerational social mobility change over cohorts born in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century? What role, if any, did education play in this? As education expanded, its association to class origins weakened, especially among earlier-born cohorts—a strong indication that growing education equalization may have been important in increasing social fluidity. There is also a strong link between upward mobility and social fluidity, the former mostly driven by the expansion of higher-level white-collar jobs. Educational expansion, equalization, and rapid structural change in the US and European economies all contributed to greater social fluidity among people born before the middle of the century. For people born later, rates of downward mobility have increased: however, despite the lack of further educational equalization and less-pronounced structural change, social fluidity has remained unchanged.

The Netherlands is well known for a sustained and marked trend towards greater social fluidity during the twentieth century. This chapter investigates trends in mobility across birth cohorts of Dutch men and women born in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. During this time there was also a rapid upgrading of the Dutch class structure and marked expansion of the educational. But education played only a limited role in driving the increase in social fluidity: rather it was due mostly to the growing shares of people from nonservice-class origins who lacked a tertiary qualification but nevertheless moved into service-class destinations. An oversupply of service-class positions, relative to the share of people with a tertiary qualification, allowed less-qualified men and women from less-advantaged class backgrounds to be upwardly mobile.

All the country chapters in this volume use the same set of methods, and this chapter explains them in simple and accessible terms. These methods include descriptive statistics for the analysis of absolute mobility, the use of log-linear models for the analysis of relative mobility or social fluidity, and simulations to assess the role played by educational equalization and educational expansion in shaping trends in social fluidity.

This chapter sets out the main goal of the volume: to examine the role of education in shaping rates and patterns of intergenerational social mobility among men and women during the twentieth century. This is a particularly timely question given the concerns of politicians and policy makers with intergenerational mobility and their belief that the solution lies in education. The chapter explains what we mean by social mobility and the distinction between absolute and relative mobility, and it sets out the reasons why we expect changes to the educational system to lead to changes in both absolute and relative mobility. The chapter discusses the reasons for choosing the eight countries on which we focus: the United States, Sweden, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. The operationalization of our main variables is explained and the questions to be addressed in each of the subsequent country chapters are set out.

We consider the problem of bias arising from conditioning on a post-outcome collider. We illustrate this with reference to Elwert and Winship (2014) but we go beyond their study to investigate the extent to which inverse probability weighting might offer solutions. We use linear models to derive expressions for the bias arising in different kinds of post-outcome confounding, and we show the specific situations in which inverse probability weighting will allow us to obtain estimates that are consistent or, if not consistent, less biased than those obtained via ordinary least squares regression.

We examine the extent to which the educational attainments of a generation are reproduced in Great Britain. We address a very specific question -- what was the effect, among people born around the middle of the 20th century, of having acquired a University degree on the probability of having a child who also acquires a degree? We consider the two central processes involved: the effect of having a degree on whether or not a person had a child and, conditional on having at least one child, the effect of having a degree on whether at least one child acquired a degree. We find a strong and persistent negative effect of having a degree on the chances of having a child but, among those who had a child, the possession of a degree had a large positive effect on the probability of that child also acquiring a degree. These two effects largely cancel out and thus having a degree had a very small effect on the chances of having a child who also had a degree. One major advantage of adopting the prospective approach used here is that it helps to better answer questions concerning the intergenerational effects of changes in education.

We propose the concept of the “Fish Revolution” to demarcate the dramatic increase in North Atlantic fisheries after AD 1500, which led to a 15-fold increase of cod (Gadus morhua) catch volumes and likely a tripling of fish protein to the European market. We consider three key questions: (1) What were the environmental parameters of the Fish Revolution? (2) What were the globalising effects of the Fish Revolution? (3) What were the consequences of the Fish Revolution for fishing communities? While these questions would have been considered unknowable a decade or two ago, methodological developments in marine environmental history and historical ecology have moved information about both supply and demand into the realm of the discernible. Although much research remains to be done, we conclude that this was a major event in the history of resource extraction from the sea, mediated by forces of climate change and globalisation, and is likely to provide a fruitful agenda for future multidisciplinary research.

Marriage is a risky undertaking that people enter with incomplete information about their partner and their future life circumstances. A large literature has shown how new information gained from unforeseen but long-lasting or permanent changes in life circumstances may trigger a divorce. We extend this literature by considering how information gained from a temporary change in life circumstances—in our case, a couple having a child with infantile colic—may affect divorce behavior. Although persistent life changes are known to induce divorce, we argue that a temporary stressful situation allows couples more quickly to discern the quality of their relationship, in some cases leading them to divorce sooner than they otherwise would have. We formalize this argument in a model of Bayesian updating and test it using data from Denmark. We find that the incidence of infantile colic shortens the time to divorce or disruption among couples who would have split up anyway.

Income inequality has grown in many countries over the past decades. Single country studies have investigated how trends in family demography, such as rising female employment, assortative mating and single parenthood, have affected this development. But the combined effects have not been studied sufficiently, much less in a comparative perspective. We apply decomposition and counterfactual analyses to Luxembourg Income Study data from the 1990s and 2000s for West Germany and the USA. We counterfactually analyse how changes in the distribution of men’s and women’s education, employment and children across households between the 1990s and 2000s affected overall inequality (Theil index). We find that changes in family demography between the 1990s and the 2000s explain inequality growth in West Germany but not in the USA, where the effects of gendered changes in education and employment offset each other. In West Germany, changes in the distribution of household types, and particularly changes in men’s employment and education, contributed to increases in income inequality. The country differences in the relationship between changes in family demography and inequality growth reflect how the decline in men’s and the growth in women’s employment played out differently in the weakening male breadwinner context in West Germany and in the universal breadwinner context in the USA.

A number of recent studies by sociologists have sought to discover whether a person’s status (typically their social class, education, or socio-economic status) is directly affected by the status of their grandparents, once the effects of parents’ status are controlled. The results have been ambiguous, with some studies finding a direct effect of grandparents on their grandchildren, while others find no effect. I use causal graphical methods to demonstrate some of the methodological problems that occur in trying to identify this direct effect, and I offer some suggestions as to how they might be addressed.

The KHB method has rapidly become popular as a way of separating theimpact of confounding from rescaling when comparing conditional andunconditional parameter estimates in non-linear probability models like the logitand probit. In this note we show that the same estimates can be obtained in asomewhat different way to that advanced by Karlson, Holm, and Breen (2012) intheir original article and implemented in the user-written Stata command khb.While the KHB method and this revised KHB method both work by holdingconstant the residual variance of the model, the revised method makescomparisons across multiple nested models easier than the original method. The Karlson–Holm–Breen (KHB) method has rapidly become popular as a way of separating the impact of confounding from rescaling when comparing conditional and unconditional parameter estimates in nonlinear probability models such as the logit and probit. In this note, we show that the same estimates can be obtained in a somewhat different way to that advanced by Karlson, Holm, and Breen in their original article and implemented in the user-written Stata command khb. While the KHB method and this revised KHB method both work by holding constant the residual variance of the model, the revised method makes comparisons across multiple nested models easier than the original method.

Methods textbooks in sociology and other social sciences routinely recommend the use of the logit or probit model when an outcome variable is binary, an ordered logit or ordered probit when it is ordinal, and a multinomial logit when it has more than two categories. But these methodological guidelines take little or no account of a body of work that, over the past 30 years, has pointed to problematic aspects of these nonlinear probability models and, particularly, to difficulties in interpreting their parameters. In this review, we draw on that literature to explain the problems, show how they manifest themselves in research, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of alternatives that have been suggested, and point to lines of further analysis.

In contemporary studies of social mobility a key distinction is drawn between observed patterns of social mobility, sometimes referred to as 'absolute mobility', and social fluidity. Absolute mobility is concerned with patterns and rates of mobility, where mobility is understood simply as movement between class origins and class destinations. Absolute mobility concerns the observed rates and patterns of flows between origin and destination classes and, in mobility analysis, is treated as the consequence of social fluidity operating within fixed origin and destination distributions. Britain is the sole clear exception to this: here there has been little or no change. In other cases—notably Germany—there is no statistically significant change, though the trend, at least for men, is towards a weaker association between origins and destinations. The experience of this project should lead people to question the balance that mobility research has struck between social fluidity and absolute mobility.

In their seminal study on the development of inequality in educational attainment in the 20th century, Shavit and Blossfeld (1993) summarize the results under the guiding title Persistent Inequality. In spite of dramatic educational expansion during the 20th century, of the 13 countries studied in their project, all but two, Sweden and the Netherlands, “exhibit stability of socio-economic inequalities of educational opportunities. Thus, whereas the proportions of all social classes attending all educational levels have increased, the relative advantage associated with privileged origins persists in all but two of the thirteen societies” (p. 22). This conclusion is based on a metanalysis of individual country studies, all of which adopt two different approaches to assess socioeconomic inequalities of educational opportunities: one is to use ordinary least squares to regress years of education achieved by sons and daughters on parents’ education and occupational prestige; the other is to regress, using binary logistic regression, a set of successive educational transitions on the same social background variables (the “Mare model”; Mare 1980, 1981). Change or persistence in inequalities of educational opportunities is diagnosed depending on whether or not significant variation over birth cohorts is found in the regression coefficients linking social background to years of education attained and the educational transitions considered. While the two analyses address different empirical phenomena—of which Shavit and Blossfeld are well aware—the results of both suggest essentially the same conclusion, which the authors then summarize as “stability of socio-economic inequalities of educational opportunities.” In the scientific community, in particular in sociology and in the education sciences, the results have been viewed as evidence of a persistently high degree of class inequality of educational attainment that can change only under rather exceptional conditions.

Although the parameters of logit and probit and other non-linear probability models are often explained and interpreted in relation to the regression coefficients of an underlying linear latent variable model, we argue that they may also be usefully interpreted in terms of the correlations between the dependent variable of the latent variable model and its predictor variables. We show how this correlation can be derived from the parameters of non-linear probability models, develop tests for the statistical significance of the derived correlation, and illustrate its usefulness in two applications. Under certain circumstances, which we explain, the derived correlation provides a way of overcoming the problems inherent in cross-sample comparisons of the parameters of non-linear probability models. Although the parameters of logit and probit and other non-linear probability models are often explained and interpreted in relation to the regression coefficients of an underlying linear latent variable model, we argue that they may also be usefully interpreted in terms of the correlations between the dependent variable of the latent variable model and its predictor variables. We show how this correlation can be derived from the parameters of non-linear probability models, develop tests for the statistical significance of the derived correlation, and illustrate its usefulness in two applications. Under certain circumstances, which we explain, the derived correlation provides a way of overcoming the problems inherent in cross-sample comparisons of the parameters of non-linear probability models.