Cross-national differences in social background effects on educational attainment and achievement: absolute vs. relative inequalities and the role of education systems

We use PIAAC data to study the relationship between parental education and educational success among adults from 23 advanced economies. We consider educational success in terms of both educational attainment (formal qualifications) and educational achievement (competencies) and in both absolute and relative terms (i.e. as the individual’s rank in the distribution of educational success). Parental education effects are stronger for educational attainment than for achievement in all countries. Cross-national variation in the strength of social background effects follows broadly similar patterns for the different ways of measuring success, but a few countries combine relatively strong achievement with relatively weak attainment effects and vice versa. Tracking in secondary education is associated with stronger background effects for educational attainment but not for achievement. Greater prevalence of formal (non-formal) AET is associated with stronger (weaker) background effects for both attainment and achievement, while vocational orientation of upper secondary education does not matter much

Designing stakeholder learning dialogues for effective global governance

A growing scholarship on multistakeholder learning dialogues suggests the importance of closely managing learning processes to help stakeholders anticipate which policies are likely to be effective. Much less work has focused on how to manage effective transnational multistakeholder learning dialogues, many of which aim to help address critical global environmental and social problems such as climate change or biodiversity loss. They face three central challenges. First, they rarely shape policies and behaviors directly, but work to ‘nudge’ or ‘tip the scales’ in domestic settings. Second, they run the risk of generating ‘compromise’ approaches incapable of ameliorating the original problem definition for which the dialogue was created. Third, they run the risk of being overly influenced, or captured, by powerful interests whose rationale for participating is to shift problem definitions or narrow instrument choices to those innocuous to their organizational or individual interests. Drawing on policy learning scholarship, we identify a six-stage learning process for anticipating effectiveness designed to minimize these risks while simultaneously fostering innovative approaches for meaningful and longlasting problem solving: Problem definition assessments; Problem framing; Developing coalition membership; Causal framework development; Scoping exercises; Knowledge institutionalization. We also identify six management techniques within each process for engaging transnational dialogues around problem solving. We show that doing so almost always requires anticipating multiple-step causal pathways through which influence of transnational and/or international actors and institutions might occur

Households’ vulnerability from trade in Vietnam

This paper assesses vulnerability from trade in Vietnam by presenting an extended version of Ligon and Schechter’s (2003) Vulnerability as low Expected Utility (VEU) measure. It uses the Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys (VHLSS) panel data covering the period 2002–06. The empirical results show that risk-induced vulnerability and heterogeneity in trade exposure matter in determining household overall vulnerability and that this is not linked to the actual manifestation of shocks. Although it does not represent, by any means, an argument against free trade, this work is relevant for policymaking since it contributes to deepen our knowledge on the subtle links between trade openness and vulnerability and informs us about suitable instruments to accompany it

Large-Scale Gene-Centric Meta-Analysis across 39 Studies Identifies Type 2 Diabetes Loci

To identify genetic factors contributing to type 2 diabetes (T2D), we performed large-scale meta-analyses by using a custom similar to 50,000 SNP genotyping array (the ITMAT-Broad-CARe array) with similar to 2000 candidate genes in 39 multiethnic population-based studies, case-control studies, and clinical trials totaling 17,418 cases and 70,298 controls. First, meta-analysis of 25 studies comprising 14,073 cases and 57,489 controls of European descent confirmed eight established T2D loci at genome-wide significance. In silico follow-up analysis of putative association signals found in independent genome-wide association studies (including 8,130 cases and 38,987 controls) performed by the DIAGRAM consortium identified a T2D locus at genome-wide significance (GATAD2A/CILP2/PBX4; p = 5.7 x 10(-9)) and two loci exceeding study-wide significance (SREBF1, and TH/INS; p <2.4 x 10(-6)). Second, meta-analyses of 1,986 cases and 7,695 controls from eight African-American studies identified study-wide-significant (p = 2.4 x 10(-7)) variants in HMGA2 and replicated variants in TCF7L2 (p = 5.1 x 10(-15)). Third, conditional analysis revealed multiple known and novel independent signals within five T2D-associated genes in samples of European ancestry and within HMGA2 in African-American samples. Fourth, a multiethnic meta-analysis of all 39 studies identified T2D-associated variants in BCL2 (p = 2.1 x 10(-8)). Finally, a composite genetic score of SNPs from new and established T2D signals was significantly associated with increased risk of diabetes in African-American, Hispanic, and Asian populations. In summary, large-scale meta-analysis involving a dense gene-centric approach has uncovered additional loci and variants that contribute to T2D risk and suggests substantial overlap of T2D association signals across multiple ethnic groups

A framework for the detection of de novo mutations in family-based sequencing data

Germline mutation detection from human DNA sequence data is challenging due to the rarity of such events relative to the intrinsic error rates of sequencing technologies and the uneven coverage across the genome. We developed PhaseByTransmission (PBT) to identify de novo single nucleotide variants and short insertions and deletions (indels) from sequence data collected in parent-offspring trios. We compute the joint probability of the data given the genotype likelihoods in the individual family members, the known familial relationships and a prior probability for the mutation rate. Candidate de novo mutations (DNMs) are reported along with their posterior probability, providing a systematic way to prioritize them for validation. Our tool is integrated in the Genome Analysis Toolkit and can be used together with the ReadBackedPhasing module to infer the parental origin of DNMs based on phase-informative reads. Using simulated data, we show that PBT outperforms existing tools, especially in low coverage data and on the X chromosome. We further show that PBT displays high validation rates on empirical parent-offspring sequencing data for whole-exome data from 104 trios and X-chromosome data from 249 parent-offspring families. Finally, we demonstrate an association between father's age at conception and the number of DNMs in female offspring's X chromosome, consistent with previous literature reports

Climate control of terrestrial carbon exchange across biomes and continents

Peer reviewe

Understanding Segregation Change: Methods and Applications

Racial residential and school segregation, while having declined in recent decades, are still pervasive in U.S. metropolitan areas. Given the consequences of segregation for individual life outcomes and its role in exacerbating inequalities in the U.S., it is of major importance to better understand the processes that shape segregation. The goal of this dissertation is to develop methods that allow us to better understand which social processes are producing increases and declines in segregation. The dissertation consists of five substantive chapters. In chapters two and four, I develop two decompositions methods that allow the decomposition of changes in segregation. The first decomposition method focuses on providing a mechanical solution to the problem of "margin dependency." Unlike alternative methods, this decomposition does not attempt to "purge'" the index from its margin dependency, but instead quantifies how much of a given change in segregation is due to changes in the margins, compared to structural changes. Arguably, this method provides more information about changes in segregation than a simple trend analysis. The fourth chapter introduces a more flexible method of decomposition, which allows the researcher to specify decompositions that are guided by theoretical considerations. This decomposition method is based on the Shapley value, originally developed in game theory. This chapter also shows that the Shapley value decomposition has many applications outside of segregation studies. The remaining substantive chapters are applications demonstrating the usefulness of these decompositions to understand changes in segregation. The third chapter applies the marginal-structural decomposition to a topic usually not considered in segregation analysis: the study of school-to-work linkages. This coauthored paper compares the skill-formation systems of France and Germany. Stratification research has often made a distinction between two ideal-types: "qualificational spaces," exemplified by Germany with a focus on vocational education, and "organizational spaces," exemplified by France with a focus on general education. Most studies that investigated this distinction did so by focusing only on the size of the vocational sector, not on whether graduates with a vocational degree actually link strongly to the labor market. Moreover, these studies often studied male workers only, ignoring potential gender differences in how school-to-work linkages are established. Our approach is instead to map the change in education-occupation linkage in France and Germany between 1970 and 2010, using the marginal-structural decomposition to distinguish between changes in rates (marginal changes) and changes in the structure of school-to-work linkages (structural changes). Surprisingly, we find that the German vocational system in 1970 was not, on average, substantially more efficient in allocating graduates to specific occupations than the French system. This finding is a major departure from earlier results, and it shows that the differences between 1970’s France and Germany, on which the qualificational-organizational distinction is based, are smaller than previously assumed. Partly, this is due to the fact that the female labor force was omitted from earlier analyses. We thus show that ignoring the female workforce has consequences for today’s conception of skill formation systems, particularly because a large share of educational expansion is caused by an increase in female enrollment in (higher) education. In the remaining two chapters, I apply the Shapley decomposition strategy to two long-standing interests of U.S. sociology: racial residential and racial school segregation. The fifth chapter, on racial residential segregation, studies changes in segregation from 1990-2010. This paper engages with a prominent concept in segregation studies, the idea of micro and macro segregation. Micro segregation refers to the small-scale neighborhood segregation within cities and suburbs, while macro segregation refers to segregation between larger geographical areas, such as cities, suburbs, and school districts. The paper first shows that, contrary to other results in literature, while micro segregation decreased, macro segregation remained at similar levels. Second, the paper shows that declines in segregation are almost exclusively caused by the Black and Hispanic populations, which have increasingly moved to majority-White areas. The sixth chapter studies changes in between-district school segregation from 2009 to 2016, studying both the relationships between school district racial composition and school district performance, as quantified by average test scores. Also in this later period, declines in segregation are mostly driven by the Black and Hispanic populations. Additionally, the decomposition by school district performance shows that families of all racial groups move from badly-performing school districts to better-performing districts