Socioeconomic Inquality and Work
Although demographers have not always examined socioeconomic inequality as a population problem, rapidly increasingly inequality in income and assets is one of the most critical problems facing the U.S. population, with current levels exceeding those of any other advanced, developed nation. In contrast to previous eras, however, inequality today is more highly associated with salary differentials deriving from work and labor market stratification rather than being primarily determined by the ownership of capital assets. PRC researchers are making significant contributions in two key areas: (1) how new forms of work facilitate or retard growing earnings inequality between workers, and (2) how best to theorize and measure the processes leading to gender, race/ethnic and other group differentials in earnings and job quality. The rise in American inequality correlates with two interrelated processes -- (1) globalization and technological change in the production of goods and services in an increasingly integrated global economy, and (2) changes in organizational practices and new forms of work that have emerged from these technological advances and competitive pressures. Yet, not much is well understood about the dynamics of these processes, how they contribute to inequality and for whom, and how they might be altered by public policy or behavioral changes to generate more positive outcomes for American society. This thematic area aims to critically address the shortage of theoretical paradigms and empirical work in this area. Center researchers are focusing on the impact of new organizational forms and practices on gender and race/ethnic inequality in the labor market, the incorporation of new waves of immigrants into the labor market, and the relevance of training and career preparation strategies for disadvantaged workers. All of these processes either directly or indirectly relate to fertility, health and mortality and migration patterns, so researchers increasingly need to incorporate these socioeconomic variables into their analyses into to better understand the causes and consequences of fundamental demographic processes.
Area Projects
Community Health and Criminal Recidivism: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Residential Change
Principal Investigator: David Kirk
Funded by: Smith Richardson Foundation
The public health consequences of high levels of criminal recidivism are dire. Recidivists tend to be high rate criminal offenders who contribute substantially to the total volume of crime in a community. In turn, neighborhood crime, particularly violence, is a stressful condition that has a variety of detrimental health consequences, including low birth weight, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, and impaired cognitive functioning. One reason for high rates of recidivism in the United States is the fact that many former prisoners return home to the same residential environment, with the same criminal peers, where they resided before incarceration. This study will examine the causal effect of residential migration far away from former neighborhoods on criminal recidivism among parolees (Aim 1). Working in collaboration with the Maryland Office of Crime Control & Prevention and the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, we will conduct a randomized controlled trial with parolees as voluntary participants. Volunteers will be randomly assigned to two groups (300 per group): (1) an experimental group who will move to a different city in Maryland relative to where they resided prior to incarceration, and (2) a control group who will not move. We will assess differences in the rate of recidivism between the groups. Parole policies heavily contribute to the reasons why ex-offenders tend to reside in proximity to where they lived prior to incarceration. In most states, prisoners released onto parole are legally required to return to their county of last residence, thus contributing to a return to old neighborhoods. If results indicate that the likelihood of criminal recidivism is lower when parolees reside in a geographic area different from where they resided prior to incarceration, then changes to legal practices that restrict residential mobility may be worth pursuing to enhance population health and the safety of communities.
The Effect of Juvenile Arrest on Reoffending and Rearrest
Principal Investigator: David S. Kirk
Funded by: The Urban Institute
Does arresting a juvenile delinquent deter future offending, or increase it? Deterrence and labeling theories generate opposite predictions and policy implications. The empirical literature to date fails to find any deterrent effect of arrest, and tentatively suggests that arresting juveniles increases reoffending. However, much of the literature is limited by relatively weak methods to control selection bias, and very little examines moderating conditions of any effects of arrest.
The Urban Institute and the University of Texas at Austin propose to use longitudinal data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) to address these limitations in studying the effect of arrest on reoffending and rearrest. Propensity score matching with the PHDCN's rich dataset will be used to generate samples of arrested and non-arrested youth who are equivalent on offending and on many predisposing individual, peer, family, school and neighborhood variables. Self-reported offending measures will allow us to examine the effects on offending, in addition to examination of official records.
We will also explore whether the effect of arrest differs as a function of key moderating variables: first vs. later arrests; age; levels of prior offending; school involvement; parental monitoring; peer delinquency and gang membership; neighborhood characteristics; and whether the effect varies by offender race, either as a result of the preceding variables, or net of those variables.
Using O*NET to Investigate Sources of Educational and Racial Variation in Marriage
Principal Investigator: Kelly Raley
Funded by: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Educational and racial differences in a variety of health related outcomes are large and as yet unexplained. Work characteristics, such as stress, recognition, and autonomy, serve as under-explored mechanisms that may connect education and race to wide-ranging aspects of well being such as mental health, family stability, physical health, and mortality. The newly revamped Dictionary of Occupational Titles (now called O*NET), linked to a data source with measures of health-related outcomes, provides an opportunity to evaluate the utility of occupational characteristics for understanding the mechanisms underlying health disparities. As a test case, we propose to investigate the potential for work characteristics to explain educational and racial disparities in marriage and cohabitation by linking data from the O*NET, 2000 Census, and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. First, this project will use these sources to create a data set describing work demands, rewards, and demographic composition that can be linked to the NLSY using 2002 census codes. Second, it will link these data to the NLSY to document racial and educational in occupational characteristics in early adulthood. Third, the project will investigate the association between occupational characteristics and women's union formation and whether attributes of occupations are linked to educational and/or racial disparities in marriage and cohabitation. Finally, after having refined our data set through the specific aims 1-3, we will make data set describing occupational demands, rewards, and demographic composition publicly available through the NLSY. This project will serve as a foundation for a larger study exploring the influence of men's and women's work characteristics on family formation and stability.
Increased Earning Dispersions and Labor Market Productivity
Principal Investigator: Arthur Sakamoto
Funded by: National Science Foundation
This research will provide insight into the nature of rising inequality in the American labor force by investigating patterns of labor market productivity and earnings differentials during the past several decades. Using official data on employment, earnings, and productivity in manufacturing industries, this investigation will study the extent to which increased earnings inequalities are associated with improved productivity or, conversely, may be simply aggrandizing the higher salaries of already privileged employees with greater bargaining power which thereby depletes revenues for pay raises among less advantaged workers. The findings will thus shed light on the critical issue of whether rising inequality is necessary to avoid economic stagnation or whether the decline of the middle-class is simply the result of exacerbating salary differentials that do not commensurately promote economic growth.
Understanding the extent and sources of underpayment and overpayment in the labor market will inform and advance public policy debates about the efficacies of current programs and laws relating to the regulation of the labor force. By identifying which specific groups of workers are not fully compensated for their productivity (and which groups may be significantly overpaid), the results will have important implications for such issues as the minimum wage, the Earned Income Tax Credit, federal income tax rates, industrial and trade policies, family-leave regulations, welfare reform, affirmative action, civil rights law, and immigration legislation.
