Compensatory advantage is a mechanism of social stratification that complements cumulative advantage and path dependence. In this article, I first discuss the theoretical foundations of the compensatory advantage and path dependence mechanisms and the methodological challenges that complicate identification of their effects. Next, I present a practical demonstration of the use of the compensatory advantage theoretical framework, with a regression discontinuity design estimating the probability of being continuously promoted throughout primary education in France. Results indicate that students born just before the cutoff date for primary school entry, who are consequently the youngest in the class when starting school, face a larger risk of grade repetition. In line with theoretical predictions of the compensatory advantage model, the risk is much smaller for students born to highly educated parents compared to students whose parents have lower educational attainment.

No abstract

Previous research has documented that children who do not live with both biological parents fare somewhat worse on a variety of outcomes than those who do. In this article, which is the introduction to the Special Issue on ''Family dynamics and children's well-being and life chances in Europe,'' we refine this picture by identifying variation in this conclusion depending on the family transitions and subpopulations studied. We start by discussing the general evidence accumulated for parental separation and ask whether the same picture emerges from research on other family transitions and structures. Subsequently, we review studies that have aimed to deal with endogeneity and discuss whether issues of causality challenge the general picture of family transitions lowering child well-being. Finally, we discuss whether previous evidence finds effects of family transitions on child outcomes to differ between children from different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, and across countries and time-periods studied. Each of the subsequent articles in this Special Issue contributes to these issues. Population (2017) 33:163-184 DOI 10.1007 evidence on how several less often studied family forms relate to child outcomes in the European context. Two other articles in this Special Issue contribute by resolving several key questions in research on variation in the consequences of parental separation by socioeconomic and immigrant background, two areas of research that have produced conflicting results so far.Eur J

We use the British Cohort Study 1970 to show that the proportion of children achieving a tertiary education degree is 8 percentage points lower for the offspring of separated parents than for children from intact families. Moreover, the children of highly educated parents experience a two times larger 'separation penalty' than the children of less educated parents. We find a similar pattern of heterogeneity in effects for the likelihood of participation in academic education (A-Levels) beyond school leaving age but not for school grades at age 16. We test three different explanations for heterogeneity in the parental separation penalty: changes in family relations, changes in income, and negative selection into separation based on unobserved characteristics. We address the potential endogeneity of parental separation by including pre-separation observable characteristics, individual fixed effects models, and a placebo test. Our key finding is that changes in family income, but not those in family relations or selection, explain a large part of heterogeneity in the effects of parental separation. Children with more highly educated parents face a larger decline in family income if parents separate and, in addition, declines in family income of equal amounts entail more negative consequences for their educational attainment.In recent years, an interesting finding has surfaced in the literature addressing the effects of parental separation on child outcomes. Several studies have found that parental separation has a greater impact on the educational and occupational attainment of children from socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds than on the attainment of their counterparts from more disadvantaged backgrounds (Biblarz and Raferty, 1993;McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994;Martin, 2012). 1 This seems a surprising result. Studies in social stratification have shown that children from advantaged socio-economic backgrounds are less affected by previous negative outcomes and disadvantageous life events that might hinder their future prospect of educational attainment (cf. Bernardi 2014). These 'compensatory effects' in education are often held responsible for the lack of downward mobility of children from higher socio-economic backgrounds (Boudon, 1998). Understanding why such 'compensatory effects' are absent in the case of parental separation could enhance our understanding of the processes that

This article provides an analysis of employment and occupational attainment of recent immigrants to Spain. We use data from the Spanish labour force surveys for the years between 2002 and 2007 and compare the probability of being active versus inactive and that of being employed versus unemployed among immigrants and native-born Spaniards, using logistic regression models. The paper then moves on to investigate the quality of the occupation achieved by means of multinomial logistic regression models. We find evidence that immigrants are not at a disadvantage in comparison to native-born Spaniards regarding the risk of unemployment. This is true even after controlling for differences in socio-demographic characteristics between immigrants and Spaniards and, in particular, after accounting for the duration of time spent in the labour market. On the other hand, a strong and persistent disadvantage even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics is confirmed for immigrants as far as their access to skilled occupations is concerned. Furthermore, this disadvantage does not disappear as time spent in the host country increases. Our findings, thus, go against the assimilation hypothesis that predicts that immigrant's occupational attainment should progressively converge to that of natives.

No abstract

We examine whether the presence of non-intact families in society is related to increased inequality in educational attainment according to social background, as suggested by the 'diverging destinies' thesis. We analyze four countries, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that differ in the prevalence of non-intact families and in the strength of the negative association between growing up in a non-intact family and children's educational attainment. We use a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition approach to calculate a 'counterfactual' estimate of differences in educational attainment between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged children in the hypothetical absence of non-intact families. Contrary to the diverging destinies thesis, we find little differences between actual and 'counterfactual' levels of inequality in educational attainment in all four countries. Whereas growing-up in a non-intact family affects the individual chances of educational attainment, the overall contribution of non-intact families to aggregate levels of social background inequality appears minimal.

No abstract