A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Multiple dimensions of social background and horizontal educational attainment in Sweden

  2018. Martin Hällsten, Max Thaning. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 56, 40-52

  Article

  We follow Swedish cohorts born between 1976 and 1984 through their educational career and analyze how different dimensions of parents' socio-economic standing (SES) in education, occupation, income, and wealth structure horizontal attainment in secondary tracks and tertiary fields. Our results show that there is strong horizontal segregation by parents' SES. However, the influence of social background dimensions on educational attainment is not uniform, but differ by combination of dimension and track or field. We identify a main contrast between parents' education, and to some extent occupation, on the one hand, and the economic dimensions of income and wealth on the other. When we assess the total contribution of all dimensions, we find that net of previous achievement about 35% of the attainment of different upper-secondary tracks, and 25% of attainment of different tertiary fields is due to social background. Despite the non-uniform pattern, this segregation is also linked to future inequality, i.e. in chances of tertiary graduation linked to upper-secondary tracks and in expected earnings linked to tertiary field choices.

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• Rising between-workplace inequalities in high-income countries

  2020. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey (et al.). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117 (17), 9277-9283

  Article

  It is well documented that earnings inequalities have risen in many high-income countries. Less clear are the linkages between rising income inequality and workplace dynamics, how within- and between-workplace inequality varies across countries, and to what extent these inequalities are moderated by national labor market institutions. In order to describe changes in the initial between- and within-firm market income distribution we analyze administrative records for 2,000,000,000+ job years nested within 50,000,000+ workplace years for 14 high-income countries in North America, Scandinavia, Continental and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. We find that countries vary a great deal in their levels and trends in earnings inequality but that the between-workplace share of wage inequality is growing in almost all countries examined and is in no country declining. We also find that earnings inequalities and the share of between-workplace inequalities are lower and grew less strongly in countries with stronger institutional employment protections and rose faster when these labor market protections weakened. Our findings suggest that firm-level restructuring and increasing wage inequalities between workplaces are more central contributors to rising income inequality than previously recognized.

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• The End of Dominance? Evaluating Measures of Socio-Economic Background in Stratification Research

  2020. Max Thaning, Martin Hällsten. European Sociological Review 36 (4), 533-547

  Article

  We analyse how to best combine information on both parents’ socio-economic status (SES) in intergenerational research. This can be done by utilizing separate measures for each parent, taking averages over parents, modelling interactions, or only using the highest value across parents—the latter commonly referred to as the dominance approach. Our brief literature review suggests that (i) the dominance tradition is widespread, although seldom theoretically or empirically justified and (ii) parental interactive models are not widely used. We assess how much of the sibling correlations in continuous measures of education, occupation, and earnings that are explained by parents’ SES in the same dimensions using the different operationalizations. The dominance approach performs poorer than other models of parental SES. For the total contribution of socio-economic background, we find a bias of about 4–6 per cent for children’s education and occupational outcomes compared with other approaches. We also conduct a separate evaluation of nominal EGP social class operationalizations and find that the dominance approach is the most suboptimal choice compared with the alternatives. In conclusion, parental averages are preferred over dominance, as an attractive and parsimonious one variable alternative, although the highest explanatory power is attributed to models using two parental measures and an interaction term.

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