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

The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans’ advantage in this respect has been attributed to three groups of factors: (i) socio-demographic characteristics, (ii) cognitive ability, and (iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We combine data from two nationally representative cohort longitudinal surveys to compare Asian-American and white students in their educational trajectories from kindergarten through high school. We find that the Asian-American educational advantage is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.

/pdf/explaining-asian-americans-academic-advantage-over-whites-2w9m0urwba.pdf

Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites

Situating their argument in the context of the Western world's five-hundred-year history of marriage, the authors of this work reveal what factors encourage marriage and cohabitation in a contemporary society where marriage and the relationships between women and men have changed dramatically. While many people still choose to marry without first cohabiting, others elect to cohabit with varying degrees of commitment or intentions of eventual marriage. The authors' controversial findings suggest that family history, religious affiliation, values, projected education, lifetime earnings, and career aspirations all tip the scales in favor of either cohabitation or marriage. This book lends new insight into young adult relationship patterns and will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and demographers alike.

Marriage and Cohabitation

The issue of whether the social class of grandparents affects grandchildren's socioeconomic outcomes net of the characteristics of the middle generation is much debated in the social mobility literature. Using data from the 2002 Chinese Household Income Project, we investigate the direct effects of grandparents on grandchildren's educational attainment in rural China. We find that the influence of grandparents is contingent on living arrangements. Although the educational level of coresident grandparents directly affects the educational attainment of their grandchildren, with an effect size similar to that of parental education, the education of noncoresident and deceased grandparents does not have any effect. These findings suggest that grandparents can directly affect grandchildren's educational outcomes through sociopsychological pathways. Our study not only adds an important case study to the literature but also sheds new light on theoretical interpretations of grandparent effects when they are found.

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The effects of grandparents on children's schooling: evidence from rural China.

Recent scholarship claims that bilingualism has a positive effect on the academic achievement of immigrant children. According to this perspective, growing up speaking two languages is beneficial because it stimulates cognitive development and allows immigrants a means of resisting unwanted assimilation. Immigrant children who are fluent bilinguals can use their nutive-language ability to maintain beneficial aspects of their ethnic culture while accommodating to the linguistic demands of an English-speaking society. Using data on first- and second-generation Asian American students from the 1988 National Educational Longitudinal Study, we test for these hypothesized effects of bilingualism. We find no evidence that bilingualism per se has a positive effect on achievement. Instead, speaking a native language with parents has a temporary positive effect if the parents are not proficient in English. These results indicate that the academic importance of bilingualism is transitional: The educational benefits of delaying linguistic assimilation exist only before immigrant parents achieve a moderate level of English-language proficiency.

http://www.ntpu.edu.tw/social/upload/P_720090226150409.pdf

Bilingualism and the academic achievement of first- and second-generation asian americans: accommodation with or without assimilation?*

Previous work on the market transition in reform-era China has missed the direct link between individuals' labour market history and individuals' labour market outcome. A typology of workers is developed based on individuals' labour market histories, and a model of selective mobility of workers from the state sector to the market sector is offered as an explanation for higher earnings returns to education in the market sector. Analysis of data from an urban survey in China reveals that commonly observed higher earnings returns to education in the market sector are limited only to recent market entrants, and that early market entrants resemble state workers in both their level of earnings and returns to education. These results challenge the prevailing wisdom that education is necessarily more highly rewarded in the market sector. Thus it is concluded that higher returns to education in the market sector should not be construed as being caused by marketization per se, and instead that the sorting process of workers in labour markets helps explain the sectoral differentials.

Yu Xie

Papers

Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites

Marriage and Cohabitation

The effects of grandparents on children's schooling: evidence from rural China.

Bilingualism and the academic achievement of first- and second-generation asian americans: accommodation with or without assimilation?*

Does the market pay off? Earnings returns to education in Urban China