The consensus view in economics is that labor markets are polarizing as job creation takes place in high-skilled and low-skilled occupations, while jobs shrink in midskilled ones. The authors argue that, in theoretical terms, polarization runs counter to all the trends that shaped the job structure over the past decades: skill-biased technological change, the international division of labor, and educational expansion. The authors then show that the polarization thesis does not hold empirically. They use the European Labor Force Survey to analyze occupational change for Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom from 1992 to 2015 and define good and bad occupations with four alternative indicators of job quality: earnings, education, prestige, and job satisfaction. Job growth was by far strongest in occupations with high job quality and weakest in occupations with low job

This article focuses on the socio-economic integration of ethnic minorities in Italy, combining the literature on migration with research on social stratification. We analyse the ethnic penalty on occupational attainment and career mobility, integrating the origin–education–destination theoretical framework with the migration status. Since ethnic penalty is an ‘umbrella concept’, we also quantify the extent to which it is mediated by differences in education and social origin. Furthermore, adopting a diachronic view of migrants’ class attainment, we verify whether the post-migration downgrading is followed by a recovery during the career, considering also mobility within the working class (standard and non-standard). Our analyses are based on the Multipurpose Survey on Households and Social Condition and Integration of Foreign Citizens. The results show that migrants are penalized in the Italian labour market, remaining largely ‘trapped’ in the working class. This inclusion at the bottom of the class structure reduces their heterogeneity by education and by social origin. Moreover, their penalty increases during the career, except when they move from the non-standard to the standard working class. Finally, we find that the ‘unexplained’ component of ethnic penalty, net of education and social origin, is substantial and increases from the first to the current job.

No abstract

The article examines the occupational mobility of immigrants in Italy in a double perspective. First, this work compares immigrants and natives in order to understand whether, and to what extent, in a country characterized overall by low social mobility, natives and migrants have the same chances for improving their social position, or the latter are disadvantaged on an ethnic basis that affects their career (research question 1). Then, the article investigates what are the factors (referring to immigrants’ human capital, socio-cultural assimilation process and ethnic network) fostering occupational mobility among immigrants (research question 2). We conduct an ordinary least squares analysis on microdata from two retrospective cross-sectional surveys, for natives and migrants, with the same sample design, questionnaire structure and variable classification, thereby allowing the comparison of results. The empirical findings confirm that intra-generational occupational mobility in Italy is overall very limited but that geographical origin is a significant factor influencing upward mobility. Thus, the existence of an ethnic penalty is confirmed. Furthermore, among migrants, high human capital improves (short-range) upward mobility, while the socio-cultural assimilation process only partly leads to economic assimilation. Conversely, the recourse to the ethnic network acts as a trap in low-qualified occupational careers, hindering an improvement of socio-economic position.

Subjective well-being research increasingly uses web surveys to understand how subjective well-being indicators are related to other concepts of interest. Although we know that mean scores on these indicators may differ between modes, we know little about whether a move to web will influence the conclusions we draw about our conceptual models. This study uses data from a unique mixed-mode survey collected in Croatia and Germany as part of the Generations and Gender Programme to examine whether the relationships between a range of subjective well-being indicators and a set of objective and subjective determinants differ between respondents answering these questions in face-to-face or web mode. Although respondents report lower subjective well-being in web than in face-to-face mode, the relationships between these variables and a range of objective and subjective indicators are relatively stable across modes. This suggests that substantive conclusions about antecedents of subjective well-being do not depend on whether data are collected via a face-to-face interview or through web survey.