*New* CSDE Computational Demography Working Group (CDWG) Hosts Michael Schultz on The Structure of Opportunity and Wage Mobility (10/23/2024)
Posted: 10/17/2024 (CSDE Workshop)
On 10/23 from 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PST, CDWG will host Dr. Michael Schultz for a research talk. Michael A. Schultz is quantitative sociologist and social demographer with expertise on work, poverty, and structural inequality. He specializes in telling stories with data to provide insight into how workers and households navigate opportunities and constraints to advance their careers and gain economic security. Michael’s research uses an intersectional and place-based approach to shed light on how social (e.g., gender, race, class) and economic positions (e.g., work, income) shape work, family, and mobility outcomes over the life course. Michael brings a political economy lens to understand how institutions like vocational education, occupations, labor markets, the criminal legal system, and welfare state policies and programs vary across places and change over time to impact the economic mobility of workers and their households. He uses advanced quantitative methods and causal analysis, including multinomial conditional logit models (also known as “discrete choice” models) and event history analysis. To date, Michael’s research is published in venues such as the American Sociological Review, the Russell Sage Foundation Journal for the Social Sciences, and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s Working Paper Series.
Title: The Structure of Opportunity and Wage Mobility
Abstract: Sociologists use the concept of “the opportunity structure” to describe how opportunities for mobility differ for workers in different places, in different organizations and jobs, and in different social positions, including race, class, and gender positions. Yet, researchers studying workers’ occupational and wage mobility over their careers have found it difficult to operationalize a structural perspective. As a result, the dominant empirical perspectives for workers’ upward mobility are individual supply-side explanations like the human capital and status attainment models. We use occupations as the unit of analysis to define the labor market structure and then use a novel method, multinomial conditional logit (MCL) models, to study three components of the opportunity structure for workers’ wage mobility. The first element is demand for jobs. We modify a Bartik industry demand shock measure by translating the shock to occupations in geographic areas. Second, firm and occupational internal labor markets provide job ladders for upward mobility. We use firm tenure and measures of institutional and skill linkages between occupations to operationalize internal labor markets. Third, opportunities for mobility are structured by the interaction between worker status characteristics, like gender and race, and the status-typing of jobs. We include measures of the gender and racial composition of occupations to study this element. Our data comes from the 2014 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We account for individual-level characteristics explaining occupation and wage mobility. We find strong evidence of the effect of all three elements on the opportunity structure on workers’ wage mobility.
CDWG Will be Hybrid in the Fall Quarter of 2024. Dr. Schultz will be available to meet with students on 10/23 to discuss research and NORC/careers in the government and research institute space. Students interested in connecting with him can directly reach out via emailing schultz-michael@norc.org.
Zoom Registration is here.
Room: Raitt 223 – The Demography Lab