FSS-DSOC Seminar: “Labor Market Transformation and Effective Immobility Maintenance in the United States”, by Prof. Lai Wei

Intergenerational income mobility in the US has remained stable in recent decades. Seeing education as the primary mechanism of intergenerational persistence, earlier literature in social stratification tried to explain the stability by exploring the various forms of continuing educational inequality by family background. I refer to this school of intellectual enterprise as effective immobility maintenance (EIM). Insightful as EIM is, other important channels of status reproduction are understudied. In this research, I extend the EIM framework to investigate the role of the labor market. The framework contends that parents pass on their income to offspring by nurturing abilities that the market values, securing their children occupations that have high monetary returns, and adapting their focus as the demands in the market shift. I test the conjecture in the case of the US labor market, which is experiencing a transformation in labor market demands. Using data from various sources, I find support for EIM through labor market. The skill and occupational advantages of rich children are changing in accordance with the demand of the labor market. This adaptation to labor market environment accounts for the constancy in intergenerational income immobility over time.

Prof. Lai Wei is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining HKU, he completed a BA in Sociology from Tsinghua University in 2018 and a PhD in Sociology from Princeton University in 2024. He studies social stratification and quantitative methodology, focusing on intergenerational mobility and causal inference. His past works try to adapt, develop, and apply causal inference methods to understand the causes, mechanisms, and consequences of social mobility.