Richard Breen

Social mobility in Europe

1. The Comparative Study of Social Mobility 2. Statistical Methods of Mobility Research 3. Social Mobility in Europe Between 1970 and 2000 4. Social Mobility in West Germany: The Long Arms of History Discovered? 5. Change in Intergenerational Class Mobility in France from the 1970s to the 1990s and its Explanation: An Analysis Following the Casmin Approach 6. The Italian Mobility Regime: 1985-1997 7. Class Transformation and Trends in Social Fluidity in the Republic of Ireland 1973-1994 8. Trends in Intergenerational Class Mobility in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century 9. Equality at a Halt? Social Mobility in Sweden 1976-1999 10. Social Mobility in Norway 1973-1995 11. Intergenerational Mobility in Poland 1972-1988-1994 12. Changes in Intergenerational Class Mobility in Hungary 1973-2000 13. Opportunities, Little Change: Class Mobility in Israeli Society 1974-1991 14. Recent Trends in Intergenerational Occupational Class Reproduction in The Netherlands 1970-1999 15. Conclusions References

Nonpersistent inequality in educational attainment: evidence from eight European countries.

In their widely cited study, Shavit and Blossfeld report stability of socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment over much of the 20th century in 11 out of 13 countries. This article outlines reasons why one might expect to find declining class inequalities in educational attainment, and, using a large data set, the authors analyze educational inequality among cohorts born in the first two‐thirds of the 20th century in eight European countries. They find, as expected, a widespread decline in educational inequality between students coming from different social origins. Their results are robust to other possible choices of method and variables, and the authors offer some explanations of why their findings contradict Shavit and Blossfeld’s conclusions.

Comparing Regression Coefficients Between Same-sample Nested Models Using Logit and Probit: A New Method

Logit and probit models are widely used in empirical sociological research. However, the common practice of comparing the coefficients of a given variable across differently specified models fitted to the same sample does not warrant the same interpretation in logits and probits as in linear regression. Unlike linear models, the change in the coefficient of the variable of interest cannot be straightforwardly attributed to the inclusion of confounding variables. The reason for this is that the variance of the underlying latent variable is not identified and will differ between models. We refer to this as the problem of rescaling. We propose a solution that allows researchers to assess the influence of confounding relative to the influence of rescaling, and we develop a test to assess the statistical significance of confounding. A further problem in making comparisons is that, in most cases, the error distribution, and not just its variance, will differ across models. Monte Carlo analyses indicate that other methods that have been proposed for dealing with the rescaling problem can lead to mistaken inferences if the error distributions are very different. In contrast, in all scenarios studied, our approach performs as least as well as, and in some cases better than, others when faced with differences in the error distributions. We present an example of our method using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study.

Total, Direct, and Indirect Effects in Logit and Probit Models

This article presents a method for estimating and interpreting total, direct, and indirect effects in logit or probit models. The method extends the decomposition properties of linear models to these models; it closes the much-discussed gap between results based on the “difference in coefficients” method and the “product of coefficients” method in mediation analysis involving nonlinear probability models models; it reports effects measured on both the logit or probit scale and the probability scale; and it identifies causal mediation effects under the sequential ignorability assumption. We also show that while our method is computationally simpler than other methods, it always performs as well as, or better than, these methods. Further derivations suggest a hitherto unrecognized issue in identifying heterogeneous mediation effects in nonlinear probability models. We conclude the article with an application of our method to data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988.

Risk, Recommodification and Stratification

In this paper I use three concepts - the hedging of risk, the transfer of risk and recommodification - to examine recent changes in the distribution of market risk. Mechanisms that formerly hedged risk - such as the welfare state and the nuclear family - have declined in effectiveness and popularity and the result has been the recommodification of individuals and their life chances. These themes are illustrated by an examination of change in the nature of employment relationships and its likely impact on the service class. The future of the service class remains linked to the informational asymmetry problem that underlies the service relationship, and this limits the degree to which employers can claim an option over the labour supply of service class workers. The paper ends by discussing some more general issues in the relationship between risk, stratification and recommodification.

Understanding contemporary Ireland : state, class and development in the Republic of Ireland

Preface - Introduction: The Transformation of Irelands Social Structure - The Evolution and Structure of the Irish State - The Transformation of the Class Structure: Occupations, Opportunities and Occupants - The State and the Distribution and Redistribution of Income - State, Class and Family - Education: The Promise of Reform and the Growth of Credentialism - Employment, Unemployment and Industrial Policy - Industrial Relations and the State - Agriculture: Policy and Politics - The Ebbing Tide - References - Index

The Accelerated Binomial Option Pricing Model

This paper describes the application of a convergence acceleration technique to the binomial option pricing model. The resulting model, termed the accelerated binomial option pricing model, also can be viewed as an approximation to the Geske-Johnson model for the value of the American put. The new model is accurate and faster than the conventional binomial model. It is applicable to a wide range of option pricing problems.

BELIEFS, RATIONAL CHOICE AND BAYESIAN LEARNING:

People act in the light of their beliefs, yet sociological theories of action have been weak in explaining why people hold the beliefs they do. I propose a means of integrating beliefs into rational choice theory using a Bayesian learning model in which people act in accordance with the beliefs they hold about the world. By observing the outcomes of their actions they modify their beliefs. This approach, in contrast with many others, recognizes that beliefs evolve in the light of experience. The approach is applied to show how the evolution of beliefs about the returns to effort in education can give rise to observed patterns of class differences in educational expectations and so to class differences in mobility chances, at least as these are mediated through educational attainment. I discuss the general issue of learning in the Bayesian approach and outline some limitations and areas of further research.

Institutional Variation and the Position of Young People: A Comparative Perspective

The articles in this issue report on a variety of young peoples behaviors and attitudes, drawn from a wide range of countries. An obvious challenge to which these findings give rise is to explain the differences between countries in these attitudes and behaviors. In this article, we look to institutional variation to supply an answer. Institutions establish a set of opportunities and constraints to which young people respond, but they also reflect, and help to establish, normatively appropriate ways of behaving. We conceptualize institutional variation in terms of welfare regime types, labor market regulation, and educational systems, and we try to sketch some of the ways in which variations in these might explain some national differences in some aspects of the position of young people and the transition from youth to adulthood.

Europeanization and Globalization Politics Against Markets in the European Union

The authors attempt to sort out three exogenous factors affecting the domestic societies of European Union (EU) member countries: market globalization, the European single market, and European supranational institutions. They offer a research design to separate the respective manifestations of each factor and apply it to four domestic dimensions: labor market, capital market, electoral competition, and center-local government relations. Although they find systematic evidence in the cases of the labor and capital markets supporting the widely shared claim that the EU is an agent of globalization, the results also point to the importance of the voluntarist component in the electoral and subgovernmental domains.