Economic Mobility

Immigrant America, 4th ed., 2014 - Chapter 4.
n this chapter, we examine in detail the most recent evidence pertaining to the education, labor force participation, occupational status, and incomes of the foreign-born population. We examine determinants of occupational and income achievement of immigrants and propose an alternative interpretation that contrasts an exclusively individualistic approach with one that takes into account the sociological reality of different contexts of reception experienced by different immigrant minorities...

Intergenerational upward economic mobility—the opportunity for children from poorer households to pull themselves up the economic ladder in adulthood—is a hallmark of a just society. In the United States, there are large regional differences in upward social mobility. The present research examined why it is easier to get ahead in some cities and harder in others. We identified the “walkability” of a city, how easy it is to get things done without a car, as a key factor in determining the upward social mobility of its residents. We 1st identified the relationship between walkability and upward mobility using tax data from approximately 10 million Americans born between 1980 and 1982. We found that this relationship is linked to both economic and psychological factors. Using data from the American Community Survey from over 3.66 million Americans, we showed that residents of walkable cities are less reliant on car ownership for employment and wages, significantly reducing 1 barrier to upward mobility. Additionally, in 2 studies, including 1 preregistered study (1,827 Americans; 1,466 Koreans), we found that people living in more walkable neighborhoods felt a greater sense of belonging to their communities, which is associated with actual changes in individual social class.

This paper studies the relationship between entrepreneurship, economic mobility and income class in one of the most informal countries in the world: Bolivia. We argue that entrepreneurs should be defined not only by the act of undertaking a business venture but also by the motivation to pursue a profit opportunity and show that both, tenure profiles and mobility premiums in hourly and monthly labor earnings, reveal that not all people who provide employment for themselves are pursuing a profit opportunity. On the contrary, most self-employed workers (own account and cooperative) began a business venture only to have a job and earn a living, and only for a handful self-employed workers who cre- ate at least one source of employment (employers), a salaried job in the formal sector is not unambiguously a superior alternative. Once we identify a set of “true” entrepreneurs, we use panel and pseudo panel data to analyze their economic mobility relative to other types of self-employed workers and to paid-employed workers. Our estimates of time (in)dependence parameters show that employers are much more mobile relative to other occupations in the labor income distribution but as mobile as salaried workers in the over- all per-capita household income distribution. In other words, employers have, on average greater unpredictability of labor income but a more stable aggregate household income. Using this estimates to analyze their upward/downward positional mobility and their long run income-class we find that employers are much more likely to move upward and end- up in the upper class in both, labor and overall income distributions. Finally, we show that, despite their significantly different mobility patters, employers do not display striking differences is their socioeconomic profile relative to their counterparts in other types of self-employment except in two particular covariates: school attainment and wealth.

Technological and societal changes have made downward social and economic mobility a pressing issue in real-world politics. This article argues that a Rawlsian society would not provide any special protection against downward mobility, and would act rightly in declining to provide such protection. Special treatment for the downwardly mobile can be grounded neither in Rawls's core principles—the basic liberties, fair equality of opportunity, and the difference prin-ciple—nor in other aspects of Rawls's theory (the concept of legitimate expectations, the idea of a life plan, the distinction between allocative and distributive justice, or the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory). Instead, a Rawlsian society is willing to sacrifice particular individuals' ambitions and plans for the achievement of justice, and offers those who lose out from justified change no special solicitude over and above the general solicitude extended to all. Rather than guaranteeing the maintenance of any particular individual or group's economic position, it provides all of its members—the upwardly mobile, the downwardly mobile, and the immobile—a form of security that is at once more generous and more limited: that they will receive the liberties, opportunities, and resources promised by the principles of justice.

This paper is a work in progress. We propose a new measure of wage earners’ intra-generational mobility with respect to their lifetime income. The measure is defined as the change of the individual’s aggregate lifetime income, compared to the income that she would have accrued, had her income over the life-cycle remained constant compared to the cohort’s median lifetime wage at each point in time. This way we manage to focus on persistent mobility, as distinct from transitory changes in mobility. We use an administrative panel data of Israel’s tax authorities, prepared on the whole cohort of wage earners aged 25 in 1986, who worked at least for one month during each of 5 equal 5-year-intervals over the 25 years to 2011. We find mobility to be positively affected by the length of work experience and negatively by a person’s number of jobs. Male mobility is also shown to be favorable compared to that of women. So is mobility for Jewish compared to Arab wage earners.

Using a mixed-methods approach, this study examines the relationship between informal social support and formal social support services and employment outcomes among residents of a public housing development relocated as part of a HOPE VI project in Charlotte, NC.  Informal social supports are resources accessible through family and friends within a neighborhood and formal social supports are provided by case managers and service providers. We find that when former public housing resident are enrolled in case management longer and have high satisfaction with their case manager, this leads to better employment outcomes. In addition, having strong bonding ties among public housing neighbors has a negative influence on employment. This study sheds light on how case managers play a role in promoting economic mobility and economic crises and providing bridging capital for poor families.

This study examined whether a positive association between personal relative deprivation and disordered gambling severity is mediated by the motivation to gamble for financial gain. We hypothesized that this would occur specifically among people who perceived a low personal capacity for upward economic mobility via conventional means of advancement. A sample of community gamblers (N = 196) completed measures of personal relative deprivation, perceptions about upward economic mobility, gambling motivations (financial, coping, enhancement and social) and disordered gambling severity. The predicted moderated mediation model was observed – among people who perceived a low capacity for upward economic mobility, relative deprivation predicted disordered gambling severity via the motivation to gamble for financial gain. This indirect effect did not hold among people who perceived a high capacity for upward mobility. These findings suggest the importance of addressing beliefs about upward economic mobility in gambling prevention and intervention strategies. Among gamblers who feel relatively deprived, it may be advantageous to highlight feasible avenues for upward economic mobility that do not involve gambling.