Although there is a large literature on social capital, empirical estimates of the effect of social capital may be biased because of social homophily, the tendency of similar people to become friends ...with each other. Despite the methodological difficulties, a recent literature has emerged across several different disciplines that tries to estimate the causal effect of social capital. This paper reviews this recent empirical literature on social capital, paying close attention to the statistical and theoretical assumptions involved. Overall, there is evidence that genuine progress has been made in estimating the effect of social capital. The reviewed articles should provide useful examples for future research.
Does social capital affect labor market outcomes? The prevalent use of job contacts to find work suggests that "who you know" is an important means of getting a good job. Network theories of social ...capital argue that well-connected workers benefit because of the job information and influence they receive through their social ties. Although a number of studies have found a positive relationship between measures of social capital and wages and/or occupational prestige, little is known about the causal effect of social networks on labor market outcomes. Four data sets are used to reassess findings on the role of social capital in the labor market. A test of causality is proposed based on the argument that if social capital variables do have a causal effect on job outcomes, then workers with high levels of social capital should be more likely to use contacts to find work, all else being equal. Results suggest that much of the effect of social capital in the existing literature reflects the tendency for similar people to become friends rather than a causal effect of friends' characteristics on labor market outcomes. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
"Occupations are central to the stratification systems of industrial countries, but they have played little role in empirical attempts to explain the well-documented increase in wage inequality that ...occurred in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. We address this deficiency by assessing occupation-level effects on wage inequality using data from the Current Population Survey for 1983 through 2008. We model the mean and variance of wages for each occupation, controlling for education and demographic factors at the individual level to test three competing explanations for the increase in wage inequality: (1) the growth of between-occupation polarization, (2) changes in education and labor force composition, and (3) residual inequality unaccounted for by occupations and demographic characteristics. After correcting for a problem with imputed data that biased Kim and Sakamoto's (2008) results, we find that between-occupation changes explain 66 percent of the increase in wage inequality from 1992 to 2008, although 23 percent of this is due to the switch to the 2000 occupation codes in 2003. Sensitivity analysis reveals that 18 percent of the increase in inequality from 1983 to 2002 is due to changes in just three occupations: managers 'not elsewhere classified,' secretaries, and computer systems analysts." Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Sekundäranalyse. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1983 bis 2008. (Autorenreferat, IAB-Doku).
Binational Social Networks and Assimilation Mouw, Ted; Chavez, Sergio; Edelblute, Heather ...
Social problems (Berkeley, Calif.),
08/2014, Letnik:
61, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
While the concept of transnationalism has gained widespread popularity among scholars as a way to describe immigrants' long-term maintenance of cross-border ties to their origin communities, critics ...have argued that the overall proportion of immigrants who engage in transnational behavior is low and that, as a result, transnationalism has little sustained effect on the process of immigrant adaptation and assimilation. In this article, we argue that a key shortcoming in the current empirical debate on transnationalism is the lack of data on the social networks that connect migrants to each other and to nonmigrants in communities of origin. To address this shortcoming, our analysis uses unique binational data on the social network connecting an immigrant sending community in Guanajuato, Mexico, to two destination areas in the United States. We test for the effect of respondents' positions in cross-border networks on their migration intentions and attitudes towards the United States using data on the opinions of their peers, their participation in cross-border and local communication networks, and their structural position in the network. The results indicate qualified empirical support for a network-based model of transnationalism; in the U.S. sample we find evidence of network clustering consistent with peer effects, while in the Mexican sample we find evidence of the importance of cross-border communication with friends.
This paper explores bias in the estimation of sampling variance in Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS). Prior methodological work on RDS has focused on its problematic assumptions and the biases and ...inefficiencies of its estimators of the population mean. Nonetheless, researchers have given only slight attention to the topic of estimating sampling variance in RDS, despite the importance of variance estimation for the construction of confidence intervals and hypothesis tests. In this paper, we show that the estimators of RDS sampling variance rely on a critical assumption that the network is First Order Markov (FOM) with respect to the dependent variable of interest. We demonstrate, through intuitive examples, mathematical generalizations, and computational experiments that current RDS variance estimators will always underestimate the population sampling variance of RDS in empirical networks that do not conform to the FOM assumption. Analysis of 215 observed university and school networks from Facebook and Add Health indicates that the FOM assumption is violated in every empirical network we analyze, and that these violations lead to substantially biased RDS estimators of sampling variance. We propose and test two alternative variance estimators that show some promise for reducing biases, but which also illustrate the limits of estimating sampling variance with only partial information on the underlying population social network.
The global rise of the COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an increase in anti-Asian discrimination with potentially deleterious effects on individuals of Asian descent. In the present study, ...we examine how two types of COVID-19-related anti-Asian discrimination and other contemporaneous stressors independently contribute to perceptions of stress in a population-representative sample of Chinese immigrants in North Carolina, as well as the moderating role of ethnic identity on the association between COVID-related discrimination and stress. Analyses rely on data collected among participants ages 18+ in the Chinese Immigrants in Raleigh-Durham (ChIRDU) study who completed surveys in 2018 and during the COVID-19 pandemic (July–September 2020). We utilize ordinary least squares regressions to examine associations of two types of COVID-related discrimination (measured by changes in perceptions of being feared by others and racism-related vigilance) and contemporaneous stressors (measured by general COVID-19-related stressors and acculturative stressors) with perceptions of stress by respondents’ pre-pandemic reports of ethnic identity. Controlling for sociodemographic predictors and other stressors, racism-related vigilance is significantly associated with higher perceived stress for Chinese immigrants who identify as completely Chinese. For those who identify as at least partly American, new perceptions of being feared by others during the pandemic are significantly associated with higher perceived stress. Acculturative and COVID-related stressors are independently associated with higher perceived stress for both groups. These results suggest that COVID-related anti-Asian discrimination aggravates the psychological burden of multiple stressors in Chinese immigrants’ lives by uniquely contributing to perceptions of stress alongside contemporaneous stressors. The results also highlight the heterogeneous mental health needs of Chinese immigrants and hold important implications for intervention development in the community studied here as well as in other Chinese communities in the US.
•Among Chinese immigrants, two types of COVID-related discrimination are associated with perceived stress during the pandemic.•Racism-related vigilance and new perceptions of being feared by others contribute to stress independent of other stressors.•Vulnerability to these two types of COVID-related discrimination depends on the value that one puts on their ethnic identity.
Labor migration offers an important mechanism to reallocate workers when there are regional differences in employment conditions. Whereas conventional wisdom suggests migration rates should increase ...during recessions as workers move out of areas that are hit hardest, initial evidence suggested that overall migration rates declined during the Great Recession, despite large regional differences in unemployment and growth rates. In this paper we use data from the American Community Survey to analyze internal migration trends before and during the economic downturn. First, we find only a modest decline in the odds of adults leaving distressed labor market areas during the Great Recession, which may result in part from challenges related to the housing price crash. Second, we estimate conditional logit models of destination choice for individuals who migrate across labor market areas; we find a substantial effect of economic factors such as labor demand, unemployment, and housing values. We also estimate latent class conditional logit models that test whether there is heterogeneity in preferences for destination characteristics among migrants. Over all, the latent class models suggest that roughly equal percentages of migrants were motivated by economic factors before and during the Great Recession. We conclude that fears of dramatic declines in labor migration seem to be unsubstantiated.
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