Martin Hällsten

Persistent nepotism in peer-review

In a replication of the high-profile contribution by Wennerås and Wold on grant peer-review, we investigate new applications processed by the medical research council in Sweden. Introducing a normalisation method for ranking applications that takes into account the differences between committees, we also use a normalisation of bibliometric measures by field. Finally, we perform a regression analysis with interaction effects. Our results indicate that female principal investigators (PIs) receive a bonus of 10% on scores, in relation to their male colleagues. However, male and female PIs having a reviewer affiliation collect an even higher bonus, approximately 15%. Nepotism seems to be a persistent problem in the Swedish grant peer review system.

The Structure of Educational Decision-making and Consequences for Inequality: A Swedish Test Case

Class differences in educational decision making are important for inequality. A unique Swedish population-level database of university applications and individuals’ ranking of different programs is used to analyze class differences in preferences for different program characteristics. Compared to individuals from service class backgrounds, individuals from manual labor class backgrounds choose programs of shorter duration with lower grade point requirements located closer to their parents’ home. Children from the service class instead prefer programs with higher earnings risk and avoid nontraditional institutions. Taken together, the differences in degree choice lead to substantial differences in expected earnings levels and expected unemployment risks.

Where Do Immigrants Fare Worse? Modeling Workplace Wage Gap Variation with Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data

The authors propose a strategy for observing and explaining workplace variance in categorically linked inequalities. Using Swedish economy-wide linked employer-employee panel data, the authors examine variation in workplace wage inequalities between native Swedes and non-Western immigrants. Consistent with relational inequality theory, the authors’ findings are that immigrant-native wage gaps vary dramatically across workplaces, even net of strong human capital controls. The authors also find that, net of observed and fixed-effect controls for individual traits, workplace immigrant-native wage gaps decline with increased workplace immigrant employment and managerial representation and increase when job segregation rises. These results are stronger in high-inequality workplaces and for white-collar employees: contexts in which one expects status-based claims on organizational resources, the central causal mechanism identified by relational inequality theory, to be stronger. The authors conclude that workplace variation in the non-Western immigrant-native wage gaps is contingent on organizational variation in the relative power of groups and the institutional context in which that power is exercised.

No way back up from ratcheting down? A critique of the 'microclass' approach to the analysis of social mobility

‘Microclasses’, detailed occupational groups, have recently been suggested as being the basis of research in social stratification; occupations represent ‘real’ social groups in contrast to the purely ‘nominal’ categories of either ‘big class’ schemata or socio-economic status scales. The microclass approach in social mobility research has been applied in a recent paper, the authors claiming to show that a strong propensity exists for intergenerational occupational inheritance, and that such inheritance is the dominant factor in social reproduction and limits equality of opportunity. We model a larger version of the same Swedish dataset as used by these authors. We show: (i) that while with many occupational groups a marked degree of intergenerational inheritance occurs among men, such inheritance is far less apparent among women, and, for both men and women, accounts for less than half of the total association in the occupational mobility table; (ii) that the microclass approach does not deal in a theoretically consistent way with the remaining associational underlying patterns of occupational mobility, since appeal is made to the theoretically alien idea of ‘socio-economic closeness’; and (iii) that a standard class approach, modified to account for occupational inheritance, can provide a more integrated understanding of patterns of immobility and mobility alike. We also give reasons for doubting whether it will prove possible to establish a theoretically consistent microclass approach to explaining intergenerational mobility propensities. Finally, on the basis of our empirical results and of the relevant philosophical literature, we argue that the microclass approach is unlikely to be helpful in addressing normative questions of equality of opportunity.

Interethnic Friendship, Trust, and Tolerance: Findings from Two North Iraqi Cities

This article examines correlates of social trust and tolerance within a high-violence context. The authors study first the extent to which friendship ties that cross ethnic boundaries are associated with specific interaction spaces (neighborhoods, workplaces, civil society organizations, and political parties) and, second, the extent to which interethnic friendships are associated with trust and tolerance. Using individual-level data () on interethnic contacts collected in 2006 in the two northern Iraqi cities of Erbil and Kirkuk, the authors show that people who spend time within ethnically heterogeneous interaction spaces are considerably more likely to have friendship ties that cross ethnic group boundaries and, in turn, also to express general social trust, interethnic trust, and tolerance toward outgroups.

Grand Advantage: Family Wealth and Grandchildren’s Educational Achievement in Sweden

We study the role of family wealth for children’s educational achievement using novel Swedish register data. In particular, we focus on the relationship between grandparents’ wealth and their grandchildren’s educational achievement. Doing so allows us to reliably establish the independent role of wealth in contributing to long-term inequalities in opportunity. We use regression models with extensive controls to account for observed socioeconomic characteristics of families, cousin fixed effects to net out potentially unobserved grandparent effects, and marginal structural models to account for endogenous selection. We find substantial associations between grandparents’ wealth and their grandchildren’s grade point averages (GPA) in the 9th grade that are only partly mediated by parents’ socioeconomic characteristics and wealth. Our findings indicate that family wealth inequality—even in a comparatively egalitarian context like Sweden—has profound consequences for the distribution of opportunity across multiple generations. We posit that our estimates of the long-term consequences of wealth inequality may be conservative for nations other than Sweden, like the United States, where family wealth—in addition to its insurance and normative functions—allows the direct purchase of educational quality and access.

Mobility Regimes and Parental Wealth: The United States, Germany, and Sweden in Comparison

We study the role of parental wealth for childrens educational and occupational outcomes across three types of welfare states and outline a theoretical model that assumes parental wealth to impact offsprings attainment through two mechanisms, wealths purchasing function and its insurance function. We argue that welfare states can limit the purchasing function of wealth, for instance by providing free education and generous social benefits, yet none of the welfare states examined here provides a functional equivalent to the insurance against adverse outcomes afforded by parental wealth. Our empirical evidence of substantial associations between parental wealth and childrens educational success and social mobility in three nations that are marked by large institutional differences is in line with this interpretation and helps us re-examine and extend existing typologies of mobility regimes.

Late Entry in Swedish Tertiary Education: Can the Opportunity of Lifelong Learning Promote Equality Over the Life Course?

In this article, I investigate the relation between economic inequality and the decision to take up studies at the tertiary level late in life. Who exactly decides to enrol? Is it advantaged or disadvantaged groups in terms of current earnings rank, occupation, unemployment experience and social origin? Using unique register data of university applications and discrete time hazard regression models, the results show the likelihood of a late entry to be especially high for individuals who are disadvantaged to a moderate extent in terms of current earnings rank and also with some unemployment experience. Class differences in the transition to tertiary education decline with age. This suggests, with a moderate amount of simplification, that lifelong learning tends to promote both intra‐ and intergenerational equality.

The effects of specific occupations in position generator measures of social capital

The position generator is a widespread method for measuring latent social capital in which respondents are queried about contacts on a list of occupations predefined by the analyst. We separate out the unique contribution of each occupation to aggregated measures of social capital. It turns out that this contribution varies vastly: knowing a person in some occupations provides substance to measures of social capital, while knowing a person in a few occupations is irrelevant and contributes statistical noise and causes attenuation bias. We discuss the implication of our findings for the design of position generator measures generally.

The class-origin wage gap: heterogeneity in education and variations across market segments†

This paper uses unique population-level matched employer-employee data on monthly wages to analyse class-origin wage gaps in the Swedish labour market. Education is the primary mediator of class origin advantages in the labour market, but mobility research often only considers the vertical dimension of education. When one uses an unusually detailed measure of education in a horizontal dimension, the wage gap between individuals of advantaged and disadvantaged class origin is found to be substantial (4-5 per cent), yet considerably smaller than when measures are used which only control for level of education and field of study. This is also the case for models with class or occupation as outcome. The class-origin wage gap varies considerably across labour market segments, such as those defined by educational levels, fields of education, industries and occupations in both seemingly unsystematic and conspicuous ways. The gap is small in the public sector, suggesting that bureaucracy may act as a leveller.