A selection of panel studies appearing in the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology between 1990 and 2003 shows that sociologists have been slow to capitalize on the advantages of panel data for controlling unobservables that threaten causal inference in observational studies. This review emphasizes regression methods that capitalize on the strengths of panel data for consistently estimating causal parameters in models for metric outcomes when measured explanatory variables are correlated with unit-specific unobservables. Both static and dynamic models are treated. Among the major subjects are fixed versus random effects methods, Hausman tests, Hausman-Taylor models, and instrumental variables methods, including Arrelano-Bond and Anderson-Hsaio estimation for models with lagged endogenous variables.

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This paper develops a framework for conceptualizing preferences for different job properties in terms of a tradeoff between risk and return in the pursuit of economic welfare. Following portfolio theory, job properties are viewed as having mean-variance properties with respect to the distribution of rates of growth in economic welfare. Actors may pursue a high return, high risk "entrepreneurial" strategy, or a low return, low risk "bureaucratic" strategy. The choice is determined by "entrepreneurial ability" and risk preferences, which in turn are rooted in the major dimensions of family and schooling background, gender, and cognitive ability. The theory is tested by anchoring it in the Wisconsin status attainment model and then fitting rank-ordered logit models to data from the 1957 and 1992 Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey. The findings support the theory-actors who are "advantaged" with respect to family background, schooling, cognitive ability and gender express a preference for "entrepreneurial" as against "bureaucratic" job properties-and highlight the strong parallels between the process generating adult job values and the process of socioeconomic achievement itself.

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