Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

/pdf/birds-of-a-feather-homophily-in-social-networks-3kjmeyr23w.pdf

Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

It is argued that P-values and the tests based upon them give unsatisfactory results, especially in large samples. It is shown that, in regression, when there are many candidate independent variables, standard variable selection procedures can give very misleading results. Also, by selecting a single model, they ignore model uncertainty and so underestimate the uncertainty about quantities of interest. The Bayesian approach to hypothesis testing, model selection, and accounting for model uncertainty is presented. Implementing this is straightforward through the use of the simple and accurate BIC approximation, and it can be done using the output from standard software. Specific results are presented for most of the types of model commonly used in sociology. It is shown that this approach overcomes the difficulties with P-values and standard model selection procedures based on them. It also allows easy comparison of nonnested models, and permits the quantification of the evidence for a null hypothesis of interest, such as a convergence theory or a hypothesis about societal norms.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/271063.pdf

Bayesian Model Selection in Social Research

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

Mechanisms explaining the negative effects of parental divorce on children's attainment have long been conjectured and assessed. Yet few studies of parental divorce have carefully attended to the assumptions and methods necessary to estimate causal mediation effects. Applying a causal framework to linked U.S. panel data, we assess the degree to which parental divorce limits children's education among whites and nonwhites and whether observed lower levels of educational attainment are explained by postdivorce family conditions and children's skills. Our analyses yield three key findings. First, the negative effect of divorce on educational attainment, particularly college, is substantial for white children; by contrast, divorce does not lower the educational attainment of nonwhite children. Second, declines in family income explain as much as one- to two-thirds of the negative effect of parental divorce on white children's education. Family instability also helps explain the effect, particularly when divorce occurs in early childhood. Children's psychosocial skills explain about one-fifth of the effect, whereas children's cognitive skills play a minimal role. Third, among nonwhites, the minimal total effect on education is explained by the offsetting influence of postdivorce declines in family income and stability alongside increases in children's psychosocial and cognitive skills.

https://sociologicalscience.com/download/vol-6/april/SocSci_v6_264to292.pdf

Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children's Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis

Life-course changes in the mediation of cognitive and non-cognitive skills for parental effects on children’s academic achievement

This study investigates how reporting heterogeneity may bias socioeconomic and demographic disparities in self-rated general health, a widely used health indicator, and how such bias can be adjusted by using new anchoring vignettes designed in the 2012 wave of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). We find systematic variation by socio-demographic characteristics in thresholds used by respondents in rating their general health status. Such threshold shifts are often non-parallel in that the effect of a certain group characteristic on the shift is stronger at one level than another. We find that the resulting bias of measuring group differentials in self-rated health can be too substantial to be ignored. We demonstrate that the CFPS anchoring vignettes prove to be an effective survey instrument in obtaining bias-adjusted estimates of health disparities not only for the CFPS sample, but also for an independent sample from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study. Effective adjustment for reporting heterogeneity may require vignette administration only to a small subsample (20-30% of the full sample). Using a single vignette can be as effective as using more in terms of anchoring, but the results are sensitive to the choice of vignette design.

/pdf/assessing-the-effectiveness-of-anchoring-vignettes-in-bias-4w0bxcvz4h.pdf

Assessing the Effectiveness of Anchoring Vignettes in Bias Reduction for Socioeconomic Disparities in Self-Rated Health among Chinese Adults.

The localistic enclave is a special kind of enclave in urban China, which is characterized by high concentration of rural migrants from the same place of origin. Prior research has documented that rural migrants work in these localistic enclaves, but the significance of participation in them for labor market outcomes among migrant workers has yet to be determined. In this article, we argue that localistic economic enclaves may improve the labor force outcomes of rural-to-urban migrants. We report results from a study of the social determinants and consequences of working in localistic enclaves, based on data from a 2010 survey of migrant workers in the Pearl River and the Yangzi River Deltas. The results provide limited support for our hypothesis: Localistic enclaves enable migrant workers to earn higher earnings overall, but the earnings returns to human capital in an enclave are limited.

Place of Origin and Labour Market Outcomes Among Migrant Workers in Urban China

Since the seminal introduction of the propensity score by Rosenbaum and Rubin, propensity-score-based (PS-based) methods have been widely used for drawing causal inferences in the behavioral and social sciences. However, the propensity score approach depends on the ignorability assumption: there are no unobserved confounders once observed covariates are taken into account. For situations where this assumption may be violated, Heckman and his associates have recently developed a novel approach based on marginal treatment effects (MTE). In this paper, we (1) explicate consequences for PS-based methods when aspects of the ignorability assumption are violated; (2) compare PS-based methods and MTE-based methods by making a close examination of their identification assumptions and estimation performances; (3) apply these two approaches in estimating the economic return to college using data from NLSY 1979 and discuss their discrepancies in results. When there is a sorting gain but no systematic baseline difference between treated and untreated units given observed covariates, PS-based methods can identify the treatment effect of the treated (TT). The MTE approach performs best when there is a valid and strong instrumental variable (IV). In addition, this paper introduces the “smoothing-difference PS-based method,” which enables us to uncover heterogeneity across people of different propensity scores in both counterfactual outcomes and treatment effects.

/pdf/propensity-score-based-methods-versus-mte-based-methods-in-w245rbuaxn.pdf

Yu Xie

Papers

Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children's Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis

Life-course changes in the mediation of cognitive and non-cognitive skills for parental effects on children’s academic achievement

Assessing the Effectiveness of Anchoring Vignettes in Bias Reduction for Socioeconomic Disparities in Self-Rated Health among Chinese Adults.

Place of Origin and Labour Market Outcomes Among Migrant Workers in Urban China

Propensity Score-Based Methods versus MTE-Based Methods in Causal Inference: Identification, Estimation, and Application.