Unequal Origins, Unequal Trajectories: Social Stratification over the Life Course.

[摘要] Social scientists and policy makers alike have long sought to understand the production, maintenance, and reproduction of inequality in society. While current scholarship on inequality tends to focus on the cross-sectional and inter-cohort variations in inequality, much less is known about how inequality is generated over the life course. My dissertation fills this intellectual gap by conducting an in-depth investigation of the patterns of inequality over the life course. It consists of three papers. The first paper establishes a life course trajectory framework for understanding the intracohort pattern of inequality, based on the random variability, trajectory heterogeneity, and cumulative advantage properties. This framework is formalized in mathematical and statistical forms, and then applied to analyze longitudinal survey data. The second paper examines the impact of marriage on people’s long-term wage trajectories over the life course and shows how this long-term marriage effect, as well as its underlying mechanisms, is shaped simultaneously by gender and race. The third paper integrates the life course perspective with theoretical innovations in family research to examine the within-couple inter-temporal responsiveness in labor supply as a risk-sharing behavior that family members adopt to collectively reduce the instability of income flows to the family. The results lend strong support to the existence of risk-sharing behaviors in reality, and also point to the significant heterogeneity in responsiveness by gender and parenthood status. Taken together, these three papers show that social inequality does not occur instantaneously, but is generated gradually over the trajectories of the human life course. Further, they imply that the generation of inequality over the life course is situated in the context of a broad range of factors, including labor market regimes, racial disparities, family organization, demographic behaviors, and gender roles.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] life course

[关键词] social stratification;life course;inequality;demography;family and work;longitudinal analysis;Sociology;Social Sciences;Public Policy and Sociology