A life course perspective on crime indicates that incarceration can disrupt key life transitions. Life course analysis ofoccupations finds that earnings mobility depends on stable employment in career jobs. These two lines of research thus suggest that incarceration reduces ex-inmates' access to the steady jobs that usually produce earnings growth among young men. Consistent with this argument, evidence for slow wage growth among ex-inmates is provided by analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Because incarceration is so prevalent-one-quarter of black non-college males in the survey were interviewed between 1979 and 1998 while in prison or jail-the effect of imprisonment on individual wages also increases aggregate race and ethnic wage inequality

A life course perspective on crime indicates that incarceration can disrupt key life transitions. Life course analysis of occupations finds that earnings mobility depends on stable employment in career jobs. These two lines of research thus suggest that incarceration reduces ex-inmates’ access to the steady jobs that usually produce earnings growth among young men. Consistent with this argument, evidence for slow wage growth among ex-inmates is provided by analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Because incarceration is so prevalent—one-quarter of black non-college males in the survey were interviewed between 1979 and 1998 while in prison or jail—the effect of imprisonment on individual wages also increases aggregate race and ethnic wage inequality.

In contrast to the diverse trends that prevailed for most of the postwar period, unionization rates in the advanced capitalist countries generally declined in the 1980s. I propose a discrete-time hazard-rate model to explain this novel pattern of labor disorganization. Model estimates indicate that union decline is related to growing economic openness, unemployment, pre-existing levels of unionization, the decentralization of collective bargaining institutions, and the electoral failure of social democratic parties through the 1980s.

Unionization follows strongly divergent patterns among OECD countries in the postwar period. I propose business cycle, demographic, and political arguments to explain varying unionization over time. Centralized union movements that engage in corporatist bargaining and union disbursement of unemployment benefits suggest explanations of crossnational variability in unionization. Analysis of annual data for 18 OECD countries from 1950 to 1985 indicates strong positive effects of union centralization and union disbursement of unemployment benefits on unionization. Union centralization also shapes the longitudinal effect of strike activity on unionization while union disbursement of unemployment benefits positively influences longitudinal effects of unemployment and employment growth. Results suggest that labor movementsflourish when they establish an institutional control over labor market outcomes beyond wage bargaining. When labor's institutional control is weak, worker militancy may encourage working class organization in trade unions.

Corporatist institutions are where peak representatives of business and labor negotiate wage and price agreements at a national level. These institutions consist of horizontal relationships between employers and unions on the one hand and vertical relationships between the union confederations and union affiliates on the other. Theories of class politics, the world market, and country size propose explanations of the development of corporatist institutions. Taken together, these theories characterize advanced capitalism in terms of the shared and conflicting interests of class actors and state actors. Robust regression analysis of data on 18 OECD countries shows that corporatist development is positively related to social democratic government and negatively related to country size. The effect of the world market on corporatist development receives only moderate support. These findings suggest that corporatism is more the outcome of parliamentary class conflict than industrial class collaboration.

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent for women. During this period, inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the union wage distribution’s shrinking weight. We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries. Accounting for unions’ effect on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality—an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education.

Although growth in the U.S. prison population over the past twenty-five years has been widely discussed, few studies examine changes in inequality in imprisonment. We study penal inequality by estimating lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men at different levels of education. Combining administrative, survey, and census data, we estimate that among men born between 1965 and 1969, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks had served time in prison by their early thirties. The risks of incarceration are highly stratified by education. Among black men born during this period, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999. The novel pervasiveness of imprisonment indicates the emergence of incarceration as a new stage in the life course of young low-skill black men.

Decades of racial progress have led some researchers and policymakers to doubt that discrimination remains an important cause of economic inequality. To study contemporary discrimination, we conducted a field experiment in the low-wage labor market of New York City, recruiting white, black, and Latino job applicants who were matched on demographic characteristics and interpersonal skills. These applicants were given equivalent résumés and sent to apply in tandem for hundreds of entry-level jobs. Our results show that black applicants were half as likely as equally qualified whites to receive a callback or job offer. In fact, black and Latino applicants with clean backgrounds fared no better than white applicants just released from prison. Additional qualitative evidence from our applicants' experiences further illustrates the multiple points at which employment trajectories can be deflected by various forms of racial bias. These results point to the subtle yet systematic forms of discrimination that continue to shape employment opportunities for low-wage workers.

Richard A. Berk, Alec Campbell, Ruth Klap, Bruce Western, The Deterrent Effect of Arrest in Incidents of Domestic Violence: A Bayesian Analysis of Four Field Experiments, American Sociological Review, Vol. 57, No. 5 (Oct., 1992), pp. 698-708

From 1975 to 2005, the variance in incomes of American families with children increased by two-thirds. In attempting to explain this trend, labor market studies emphasize the rising pay of college graduates, while demographers typically highlight the implications of family structural changes across time. In this article, we join these lines of research by conceiving of income inequality as the joint product of the distribution of earnings in the labor market and the pooling of incomes in families. We develop this framework with a decomposition of family income inequality using annual data from the March Current Population Survey. Our analysis shows that disparities in education and single parenthood contributed to income inequality, but rising educational attainment and women's employment offset these effects. Most of the increase in family income inequality was due to increasing within-group inequality, which was widely shared across family types and levels of schooling.