The intragenerational mobility of the top income earners during financial crises, a story of a cohort.

In this study, we explore the dynamics of the intragenerational mobility of the top income earners during financial crises. We analyze panel data on the income levels of a cohort consisting of 22,601 individuals in Israel born between 1963 and 1973, for the period between 1995 and 2013. Studying a specific cohort allows us to focus on the changes caused by period effects, rather than cohort replacement distortions. We use common intragenerational mobility measurements before, during, and after two major recessions- the Dot.com crisis and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008- which occurred during the analyzed period. However, since these are usually descriptive, we adopt a methodology that enables us to calculate confidence intervals of these measurements and thus test for changes over time. Our results show if the two crises had any effect on the intragenerational mobility of the top income earners of the analyzed cohort, it was a minor and transitory effect.

Does the Pandemic Affect Inequality Within Families?: The Case of Dual-Earner Couples in Israel.

This article exploits the unique consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak to examine whether time constraints drive the unequal division of unpaid labor between dual-earner couples in Israel. Using the first wave of longitudinal household data that was collected in Israel since the outbreak of the pandemic, we focused on 325 dual-earner couples who stayed employed during the first lockdown. By employing OLS regressions, we examined the association between changes in employment hours and changes in unpaid labor for partnered men and women. Strong evidence was found for a gendered translation of the time constraints mechanism: A decrease in hours of paid work is related to an increase in hours of care for children among men and women, but time devoted to housework increased only among women. We conclude that time constraints that resulted from the dramatic effect of the first lockdown on paid and unpaid work in Israel did not significantly change the gender division of unpaid housework but did change the distribution of childcare. The theoretical implications of this conclusion for future research are discussed.

Intergenerational educational mobility and life course earnings in Israel.

This study brings to the fore the importance of absolute intergenerational educational mobility rates and patterns and its consequences for long-term earnings trajectories. Building on the cumulative advantage mechanism, we develop a theoretical formulation for testing the consequences of educational mobility for long-term earnings trajectories. Using data linking the 1983 and 1995 censuses in Israel with annual registered earnings data from 1995 to 2013, we find striking differences in intergenerational educational mobility rates and patterns between Israel's sub-populations. We then show that the intersection of own and parental education (i.e., intergenerational educational mobility) is associated with growing (dis)advantages over the life course. These results are in sharp contrast to a snapshot perspective, where we find that parental education does not bear influence on their offspring's earnings. Finally, we find gender but not ethno-religious differences in the long-term earnings consequences of educational mobility in Israel. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Social mobility in 20 modern societies: The role of economic and political context.

It is commonly argued that social mobility rates are influenced by economic and political conditions. Nevertheless, research on this issue has tended to be hindered by two limitations that make it difficult to draw strong conclusions about contextual effects: (1) seldom have country-level and individual-level influences been tested simultaneously, and (2) only rarely have data more recent than the 1970s been employed. We improve on previous research by employing multilevel models fitted to relatively recent survey data collected from 20 modern societies by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and national-level characteristics derived from various official sources. Our findings demonstrate systematic cross-national variation in the association between the occupational status of respondents and their fathers. Consistent with the industrialization thesis, this variation is positively associated with per-capita GDP, suggesting that more affluent nations are characterized by more open and fluid stratification structures. Our results also suggest the importance of political regimes and migration for social mobility. In contrast, economic inequality appears to explain very little of the cross-national variation in mobility rates.

On class differentials in educational attainment.

Social class differentials in educational attainment have been extensively studied in numerous countries. In this paper, we begin by examining class differentials in the progression to higher secondary education among 16-year-old children in England and Wales. As has been shown for other countries, the differentials result both from the primary effects of differing levels of academic performance of children of different class background and from the secondary effects of differences in the educational choices that these children make at given levels of performance. Through counterfactual analyses in which the performance distribution of one class is combined with the choice distribution of another, primary and secondary effects are decomposed and the former are shown to be roughly three times the size of the latter.