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...

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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

It is well known that children’s academic performances are affected by both their family backgrounds and contextual or structural factors such as the urban–rural difference and regional variation. ...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2057150X19837908

The influences of family background and structural factors on children’s academic performances: A cross-country comparative study:

In the past three decades, income inequality in China has increased rapidly relative to both China’s own past and other countries at similar levels of economic development. Using recent longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this article examines changes in income inequality and poverty prevalence between 2010 and 2012. Surprisingly, we find a modest decline in income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficients in the CFPS data. The urban–rural gap narrowed, with rural families enjoying faster income growth than urban families enjoyed. Income growth was greater for middle-income families than for families with either high or low incomes in 2010. By all measures, poverty was greatly reduced between 2010 and 2012. Two-thirds of families that had been poor in 2010 escaped poverty by 2012.

/pdf/short-term-trends-in-china-s-income-inequality-and-poverty-3q6ry15u49.pdf

Short-term trends in China’s income inequality and poverty: evidence from a longitudinal household survey

The purging method controlling for the composition-group interaction developed by Clogg and his associates has proven useful in demographic research. This article proposes an alternative method, partial CD purging, that controls the interaction between composition and the dependent variable. The purged rates from this new method are invariant to changes in the marginal distribution of composition, but those from the earlier purging method are not. Mathematical relationships between the proposed method and other techniques are also explored.

An Alternative Purging Method: Controlling the Composition-Dependent Interaction in an Analysis of Rates

-hte- performs heterogeneous treatment effect analyses as proposed by Xie, Brand, and Jann (2012, Sociological Methodology 42: 314-347). Three methods are supported, the stratification-multilevel method (-hte sm-), the matching-smoothing method (-hte ms-), and the smoothing-differencing method (-hte sd-). The -pscore- command (see -net sj 5-3 st0026_2-) and the -psmatch2- command (see -ssc describe psmatch2-) are required.

HTE: Stata module to perform heterogeneous treatment effect analysis

Among rural-to-urban migrants, migrant workers from the same origins tend to concentrate in the same workplaces. When this concentration in a workplace is sufficiently dense, we may consider it a native-place enclave. According to extensive literature on US immigrants, enclave participation may improve the economic well-being of immigrants. This study borrows the same reasoning to evaluate whether or not working in a native-place enclave affects earnings of migrant workers in urban China. We pay particular attention to heterogeneity, not only in how migrants who work in an enclave may differ from those who choose to work in the open economy, but also in varying earnings returns to enclave participation across different groups of migrant workers. Using data from a 2010 survey of migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta, we match enclave workers and non-enclave workers with the same propensity to work in an enclave and then compare their earnings differences. We find a positive a...

/pdf/ethnic-enclaves-revisited-effects-on-earnings-of-migrant-4y7h4pf9ua.pdf

Yu Xie

Papers

The influences of family background and structural factors on children’s academic performances: A cross-country comparative study:

Short-term trends in China’s income inequality and poverty: evidence from a longitudinal household survey

An Alternative Purging Method: Controlling the Composition-Dependent Interaction in an Analysis of Rates

HTE: Stata module to perform heterogeneous treatment effect analysis

Ethnic enclaves revisited: Effects on earnings of migrant workers in China.