Abstract:
Education acts on social stratification in multiple ways. Past work emphasizes two generic mechanisms—unequal access to education and heterogenous returns to education across social-origin groups—that can either increase or decrease pre-existing group differences. This talk identifies a new, third, mechanism by which education may affect between-group differences—differential sorting into education within groups. We make three contributions. First, we introduce a non-parametric causal decomposition that cleanly disambiguates all three mechanisms. Second, we develop semi-parametric estimators for all components under standard assumptions. Third, we present empirical applications and show that college graduation plays multiple and nearly countervailing causal roles in intergenerational income mobility, including via the new mechanism. (Joint work with Jen-Chen Chao and Ang Yu.)
Felix Elwert, Ph.D. is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and editor-in-chief of Sociological Methods & Research.