Parental Wealth Effects on Living Standards and Asset Holdings: Results from Chile

This paper examines aspects of the replication of inequality across generations and attempts to assess the extent to which parental resources influence the life chances and living standards of adult children. The data come from a survey of 4,400 households in Chile that focused on parental resources and outcomes in children's lives. The results reveal several pathways by which parental resources affect children's economic well-being. In particular, the living standard outcome measures are influenced indirectly, through parental investments in education and earnings capacity, whereas the wealth holdings of families are largly impacted directly, through transfers of parental assets.Chile, wealth, intergenerational transfers, stratification

How Globalization Has Impacted Labor: A Review Essay

This essay outlines the features of globalization in the current era and indicates how conceptualizations of this process differ from the related formulations of the Annales School and of World Systems Analysis. The main theme of the paper is then developed, namely an assessment of the ways that globalization has impacted the organization of work and the structure of employment careers. This assessment is based on results from a variety of recent research studies, especially on findings from the Globalife project

Careers, Labor Market Structure, and Socioeconomic Achievement

The objective of this paper is to develop the notion of the career as a strategic link between structural features of the labor market and the socioeconomic attainments of individuals. In the first section we review the treatment of careers in the occupational sociology literature and consider limitations of the traditional conceptualization. In the second section the main features of career lines, their structures and reward trajectories, are described. In conjunction with this discussion, the virtues and drawbacks of several strategies for delineating career lines from empirical data are addressed. In the next section we sketch the determinants of career-line structures as they reside in industry organization and labor market composition. In the concluding pages we consider the implications of a labor market overlaid with career lines for investigations of the socioeconomic-achievement process

The Causes of Racial Disturbances: Tests of an Explanation

The adequacy of a recently proposed explanation for the location of racial disorders during the 1960's is evaluated in this paper. Two approaches to evaluation are used: (1) The proportion of variation accounted for by the variables assumed to be related to the occurrence of disorders is compared with an estimate of the "maximum explainable proportion of variation," and (2) the structural equation derived from an analysis of the 1961-67 disorders is used to predict the locations of the 1968 disturbances. The conclusions from these investigations support the proposed explanation only with respect to the non-South, but indicate that the distribution of disorders among southern cities has been converging during the late 1960's to the pattern which has been prevalent in the non-South throughout this decade. This finding is interpreted as evidence of the decreasing importance of regional cultures as an intervening factor in the development of black solidarity

Reply to Vigderhous

Spilerman responds to Vigderhous's critique of his article ""Development Towns in Israel: The Role of Community in Creating Ethnic Disparities in Labor Force Characteristics". According to Spilerman, Vigderhous's comments are simply restatements of the arguments. He maintains that Vinderhous ignores the analytical results, and instead of understanding the reasoning disregards the argument

Israeli Attitudes about Inter Vivos Transfers

Using data from the 1994- 95 Survey of Families in Israel—which includes 1,607 urban Jewish respondents interviewed on topics relating to work behavior, household income, wealth, assistance received from parents and given to children, and views about financial responsibilities between parents and children—the authors examined attitudes in Israel about intergenerational assistance and the effects of these attitudes on transfer decisions by parents. Views about parental obligations are likely not independent of a country's economic and social organization. In a country with an extensive program of public assistance for young adults, for example, there may be less need for private family transfers and less of a sense of parental responsibility for providing support. Similarly, where young couples face severe liquidity constraints or otherwise require substantial resources in order to begin a household, parental feelings of obligation might be heightened. Israel is a country in which the need for parental support is high and the level of parental involvement in the financial lives of young adults is often considerable.

Wealth and Stratification Processes

This paper reviews current information on wealth trends, with particular attention to the role of household wealth in the stratification system. The first section considers the relevance of wealth for stratification processes and examines why an appreciation of household wealth has been slow to materialize in stratification research. Subsequent sections discuss aspects of the distribution of household wealth in the United States, the transmission of inequality across generations, and implications of a consideration of wealth for stratification theory and social policy. The concluding section conveys some observations about the need for developing models of consumption potential and living standards, akin to the socioeconomic attainment formulation, which incorporate measures of household wealth and the transmission of wealth

"Israeli Attitudes About Inter Vivos Transfers"

Using data from the 1994-95 Survey of Families in Israel--which includes 1,607 urban Jewish respondents interviewed on topics relating to work behavior, household income, wealth, assistance received from parents and given to children, and views about financial responsibilities between parents and children--the authors examined attitudes in Israel about intergenerational assistance and the effects of these attitudes on transfer decisions by parents. Views about parental obligations are likely not independent of a country's economic and social organization. In a country with an extensive program of public assistance for young adults, for example, there may be less need for private family transfers and less of a sense of parental responsibility for providing support. Similarly, where young couples face severe liquidity constraints or otherwise require substantial resources in order to begin a household, parental feelings of obligation might be heightened. Israel is a country in which the need for parental support is high and the level of parental involvement in the financial lives of young adults is often considerable.

Structural Characteristics of Cities and the Severity of Racial Disorders

This study attempts to ascertain whether particular structural arrangements and demographic features of a community were responsible for especially severe disturbances during the 1960s. Preliminary to addressing this question, consideration is given to the manner of measuring severity and to the volatile components of this phenomenon. With respect to the latter, it is found that (1) disorder severity declined as a function of the number of prior outbreaks in a city and (2) there is evidence for a temporal effect, with the post-Martin Luther King-assassination disturbances having been unusually destructive. Regarding the more stable (community) determinants of disorder severity, only Negro population size and a dummy term for South were found to be related to severity. Net of these variables, various indicators of Negro disadvantage in a community failed to reveal significant associations with severity. This result is interpreted as further evidence for the distinctly national character of the disturbances in the 1960s