Socially-embedded investments: Explaining gender differences in job-specific skills

Gender-differences in post-schooling skill investments play a central role in stratification processes. Yet little research has been devoted to explaining how these differences come about. This paperhelps to fill this gap by proposing and testing a job-investment model with social-interaction effects that melds substantive ideas of sociology and economics. Firms use strategic compensation profiles in order to protect their job-specific skill investments and this shifts the weight of the investment decision to the supply side. Employees consider the tenure-reward profiles of different job-specific investment options and chose rationally on the basis of their expected survival probabilities in each of them. Given uncertainty, actors are likely to inform their job-survival expectations by observing their social context. Three different forms of social influence are distinguished: social-learning,social norms and role identification. It is further argued that social influences on job-survival expectations can be identified empirically by blocking individuals\' work and family preferences. Several hypotheses are derived and tested to a subsample of approximately 2,700 young single wage-earners nested in 261 different European regions and 24 different European countries. Results show that young women\'s job-investment decisions are significantly correlated with 1) the social visibility of women in highly specialized jobs in the preceding generation; 2) the proportion of men who do housework in their potential marriage markets, and 3) the existing fertility norms.gender; job-specific investments; social interactions; strategic compensation; social learning; social norms; role identification; prefrences; european social survey

Girls like pink: Explaining sex-typed occupational aspirations amongst young children

There is a high degree of sex-typing in young children's occupational aspirations and this has consequences for subsequent occupational segregation. Sociologists typically attribute early sex-differences in occupational preferences to gender socialization. Yet we still know surprisingly little about the mechanisms involved in the intergenerational transmission of sex-typical preferences and there is considerable theoretical controversy regarding the role of individual agency in the process of preference formation. This study analyzes the determinants of sex-typed occupational aspirations amongst British children aged between 11 and 15. We specify different mechanisms involved in the transmission of sex-typical preferences and propose an innovative definition of individual agency that is anchored in observable psychological traits linked to self-direction. This allows us to perform a simultaneous test of socialization and agency predictors of occupational sex-typing. We find that parental influences on occupational preferences operate mainly through three distinctive channels: 1) the effect that parental socio-economic resources have on the scope of children‘s occupational aspirations, 2) children's direct imitation of parental occupations, and 3) children's learning of sex-typed roles via the observation of parental behavior. We also find a strong net effect of children's own psychological predispositions —self-esteem in particular— on the incidence of sex-typical occupational preferences. Yet large differences in the occupational aspirations of girls and boys remain unexplained.Gender segregation; occupational aspirations; children; socialization; agency; personality traits; mechanisms; british household panel survey

Labor-market exposure as a determinant of attitudes toward immigration

This paper re-examines the role of labor-market competition as a determinant of attitudes toward immigration. We claim two main contributions. First, we use more sophisticated measures of the degree of exposure to competition from immigrants than previously done. Specifically, we focus on the protection derived from investments in job-specific human capital and from specialization in communication-intensive jobs, in addition to formal education. Second, we explicitly account for the potential endogeneity arising from job search. Methodologically, we estimate, by instrumental variables, an econometric model that allows for heterogeneity at the individual, regional, and country level. Drawing on the 2004 European Social Survey, we obtain three main results. First, our estimates show that individuals that are currently employed in less exposed jobs are relatively more pro-immigration. This is true for both our new measures of exposure. Second, we show that the protection granted by job-specific human capital is clearly distinct from the protection granted by formal education. Yet the positive effect of education on pro-immigration attitudes is greatly reduced when we control for the degree of communication intensity of respondents' occupations. Third, OLS estimates are biased in a direction that suggests that natives respond to immigration by switching to less exposed jobs. The latter finding provides indirect support for the endogenous job specialization hypothesis postulated by Peri and Sparber (2009).immigration attitudes; labor market; job-specific human capital; communication skills; international migration

Labor-Market Exposure as a Determinant of Attitudes toward Immigration

This paper re-examines the role of labor-market competition as a determinant of attitudes toward immigration. We claim two main contributions. First, we use more sophisticated measures of the degree of exposure to competition from immigrants than previously done. Specifically, we focus on the protection derived from investments in job-specific human capital and from specialization in communication-intensive jobs, in addition to formal education. Second, we explicitly account for the potential endogeneity arising from job search. Methodologically, we estimate, by instrumental variables, an econometric model that allows for heterogeneity at the individual, regional, and country level. Drawing on the 2004 European Social Survey, we obtain three main results. First, our estimates show that individuals that are currently employed in less exposed jobs are relatively more pro-immigration. This is true for both our new measures of exposure. Second, we show that the protection granted by job-specific human capital is clearly distinct from the protection granted by formal education. Yet the positive effect of education on pro-immigration attitudes is greatly reduced when we control for the degree of communication intensity of respondents' occupations. Third, OLS estimates are biased in a direction that suggests that natives respond to immigration by switching to less exposed jobs. The latter finding provides indirect support for the endogenous job specialization hypothesis postulated by Peri and Sparber (2009).immigration attitudes, labor market, job-specific human capital, communication skills, international migration

Socially embedded investments: explaining gender differences in job-specific skills

This article offers an innovative explanation for gender differences in job specialization that connects individual choices to the social structure. Decisions about jobs are modeled as a choice over different tenure-reward slopes, which are steeper for more specialized skills. The choice of job depends on expected duration. Individuals have imperfect information about their probability of success in different jobs and form expectations partly by observing the social context. Because women face greater constraints and uncertainties than men, their choices depend more on this context. Contextual influences on job specialization are tested for European respondents nested in 234 different regions. Consonant with the theory's predictions, women are found to have more specialized jobs in regions where (1) the preceding generation's job specialization diverged less by gender, (2) peers arrange a more equal division of housework, and (3) peers have fewer children.Pubblicad

Capturing culture: a new method to estimate exogenous cultural effects using migrant populations

We know that culture influences people's behavior. Yet estimating the exact extent of this influence poses a formidable methodological challenge for the social sciences. This is because preferences and beliefs are endogenous, that is, they are shaped by individuals' own experiences and affected by the same macro-structural conditions that constrain their actions. This study introduces a new method to overcome endogeneity problems in the estimation of cultural effects by using migrant populations. This innovative method uses imputed traits, generated from non-migrating equivalents observed at the country of origin, as instruments for immigrants' own cultural traits measured at the country of destination. By construction, imputed traits are exogenous to immigrants' host social environment. The predicted power of imputed traits over observed traits in instrumental-variable estimation captures the non-idiosyncratic component of preferences and beliefs that migrants and non-migrating equivalents share as members of the same national-origin group, that is, their culture. I use this innovative method to estimate the net exogenous impact of traditional values on female labor-force participation in Europe. I find that this impact is much larger than standard regression methods would suggest.This study is part of the project Competition, Adaptation and Labour-Market Attainment of International Migrants in Europe, CALMA, funded by the 6th National Plan of Scientific Research, Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CSO2012-38521).Publicad

Grandes Datos, Grandes Sesgos, Grandes Errores: Sobre el Atlas de Oportunidades

The Atlas de Oportunidades, recently launched by the Felipe Gonzalez and the Cotec foundations, has been defined by its authors as a unique tool to study social mobility in Spain. In this paper I contend that the Atlas is actually a bad tool for studying social mobility for both conceptual and methodological reasons. Conceptually, the Atlas offers a limited tool because it reduces social mobility to income mobility and this obscures our understanding of the factors and mechanisms involved in the processes of socio-economic attainment and the transmission of social (dis)advantage. The Atlas is also, and most importantly, a bad tool for the study of intergenerational income mobility because its immense database introduces severe methodological biases, which inevitably lead to a gross overestimation of the actual levels of income mobility in Spain.El Atlas de Oportunidades, impulsado por las fundaciones Felipe González y Cotec, ha sido recientemente presentado por sus autores como una herramienta única para estudiar la movilidad social en España. En este trabajo sostengo que el Atlas es, en realidad, una mala herramienta para el estudio de la movilidad social, tanto por razones conceptuales como, sobre todo, por razones metodológicas. El Atlas es una herramienta conceptualmente limitada porque reduce la movilidad social a la movilidad de ingresos y esto oscurece nuestra compresión de los factores y procesos implicados en el logro socio-económico y la transmisión de la (des)ventaja social. El Atlas es, además, una mala base de datos para estudiar la movilidad intergeneracional de ingresos porque, a pesar de su gigantesco tamaño, introduce sesgos muy serios, que conducen inevitablemente a una abultada sobrestimación de la movilidad de ingresos realmente existente en España

Desregulación parcial y desigualdad horizontal en España

This article explains why the deregulation policy implemented in Spain from 1984 onwards generated important inequalities amongst workers of equivalent productivity. To this end, the paper reviews the existing evidence on the distribution of individual labour market opportunities from 1984 to 1997, the time-period during which segmentation by type of contract was consolidated in Spain. These data are complemented with new evidence based on the 'chained' version of the Spanish Labour Force Survey. The main idea of this article is that the introduction of temporary contracts in an institutional context characterised by high dismissal costs for standard employment and a collective bargaining system that is ill-suited for an inclusive representation of interests generated two distinctive micro-level mechanisms: the so-called buffer and incentive effects. Both effects combined can account for the strong process of labour market segmentation observed in Spain between 1984 and 1997.En este artículo se explica cómo y por qué la política de desregulación laboral inaugurada en 1984 generó importantes desigualdades entre trabajadores de productividad equiparable. Para ello, se revisan los datos empíricos existentes sobre la distribución de oportunidades laborales entre 1984 y 1997, periodo en el que se consolida en España un mercado de estables y precarios. Dichos datos se complementan con nuevos análisis basados en la versión enlazada de la Encuesta de Población Activa. La idea central del artículo es que la introducción de los contratos temporales en un contexto institucional caracterizado por elevados costes de despido y un sistema de negociación colectiva poco inclusivo desencadena dos tipos de mecanismos que operan en el ámbito microeconómico: el efecto de incentivación y el efecto de amortiguación. Ambos efectos combinados pueden explicar el fuerte proceso de segmentación laboral observado en España entre 1984 y 1997

Are Migrants Selected on Motivational Orientations? Selectivity Patterns amongst International Migrants in Europe

Migration scholars often assume migrants are the most ambitious and motivated individuals of their home countries. Yet research on motivational selectivity is scant. We present the first systematic cross-national analysis of migrants' selectivity on achievement-related motivational orientations (ARMOs). We measure ARMOs using a validated scale that combines orientations towards socio-economic success, risk, and money. Matching the European Social Survey and the World Value Survey cumulative data sets, we examine whether international migrants recently arrived in Europe are more achievement-oriented than those observational equivalents that do not migrate. We focus on migrants from nine different origins (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Morocco, Brazil, and Andean countries) sampled at different European destinations varying in gross domestic product, type of welfare state, and linguistic distance. Our findings seem to contradict the arguments about a common migrant personality put forward by social psychologists, as well as most of the predictions of standard economic models. We do find, however, some support for the welfare magnet hypothesis, as well as for the expectation that gender traditionalism favours negative selectivity of migrant women. We show that reported estimates are not driven by educational selectivity and are unlikely to be biased by destination effects.This study received financial support from the following two projects: Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration, and Markets, GEMM, funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 programme (ID 649255), and New Approaches to Immigration Research, NewAIR, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CSO2016-78452)