About Me
I am a quantitative sociologist and social demographer who studies how institutions shape economic outcomes for workers and their households over their lives.
I am a Senior Research Scientist at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance at the University of Washington.
I am currently the the Principal Investigator (PI) for two current research projects:
- Job Ladders in the STEM Skilled Technical Workforce funded by the National Science Foundation Education Core Research (ECR: Core)
- Occupational Destinations of WA Postsecondary Students funded by the Strada Education Foundation
Areas of Interest
- Economic Mobility and Social Policy
- Workers’ Careers and the Future of Work
- Education-to-Work Transitions
- Quantitative Methods
Research Approach
I use longitudinal survey and administrative data to study how changes in the labor market, education system, and the social safety net affect workers’ jobs and wages, and their households’ economic security.
I collaborate with community organizations and government to bridge the gap between research and practice to conduct research and build data infrastructure for the public good.
I take inspiration from the qualitative tradition in the sociology of work and organizations that investigates how social processes and political economy structure people’s lives, including:
- Hochschild’s (1997) The Time Bind
- Waldinger and Lichter’s (2003) How the Other Half Works
- Reskin and Roos’ (1990) Job Queues, Gender Queues
- Soss, Fording, and Schram’s (2011) Disciplining the Poor
- Prasad’s (2012) The Land of Too Much
I write about economic mobility and the future of work on my Substack blog, Rolling Downhill.
Selected Research
Job Ladders and Workers’ Careers
Abstract
This article contributes to research on intragenerational mobility and careers by conceptualizing and measuring three types of orderly careers defined by patterns of attachment to and mobility among organizations and occupations: those that are focused on a particular employer; those centered in a single occupation; and those that span occupations. The latter is the most complex and we identify orderly careers that traverse occupations in two ways: (1) as sequential movement in occupational internal labor markets (OILMs), which are structures that enable upward job and wage mobility that we measure using data from the CPS and O∗NET; and (2) as movement among occupational networks. We classify workers into career types from the bottom up, using their work histories in the NLSY. Our conceptualization of career types provides a link between labor market structures and intragenerational mobility by showing that orderly career types are associated with higher wages than disorderly careers and that OILM careers are related to greater wage growth.
Abstract
Does working in a low-wage job lead to increased opportunities for upward mobility, or is it a dead-end that traps workers? In this article, we examine whether low-wage jobs are “stepping stones” that enable workers to move to higher-paid jobs that are linked by institutional mobility ladders and skill transferability. To identify occupational linkages, we create two measures of occupational similarity using data on occupational mobility from matched samples of the Current Population Survey (CPS) and data on multiple dimensions of job skills from the O*NET. We test whether work experience in low-wage occupations increases mobility between linked occupations that results in upward wage mobility. Our analysis uses longitudinal data on low-wage workers from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) and the 1996 to 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). We test the stepping-stone perspective using multinomial conditional logit (MCL) models, which allow us to analyze the joint effects of work experience and occupational linkages on achieving upward wage mobility. We find evidence for stepping-stone mobility in certain areas of the low-wage occupational structure. In these occupations, low-wage workers can acquire skills through work experience that facilitate upward mobility through occupational changes to skill and institutionally linked occupations.
Opportunity Structures and Workers’ Occupational and Wage Mobility.
Working Paper (Schultz, Mouw, & Kalleberg)Abstract
Workers’ wage mobility over their work life is shaped by opportunity structures in the labor market. We use occupations to identify positions in the labor market and operationalize two forms of opportunity structures: job availability and job access. Occupations are a meso-level unit of analysis and the key link in our research design to study how workers’ job and wage mobility is shaped by macro-level changes in the labor market. The analysis uses a multinomial conditional logit (MCL) to jointly model a workers’ occupational destination from a set of all possible occupations and upward wage mobility defined as a 10 percent wage gain. Elements of occupational structure are incorporated into the analysis as characteristics of destination occupations. We analyze four elements of job availability: changes in occupational size, occupational turnover, age structure, and occupational labor demand. Labor demand is measured using is a Bartik industry demand shock translated into its occupational components in local labor markets. Job access is studied through the interaction of an individual characteristic (a worker’s origin occupation, gender, and race) and the structural characteristic of the destination occupations (strength of the skill and institutional link between origin and destination occupations, occupational gender and racial compositions).
Interrupted Careers: A New Approach to Measuring Childbirth-Related Career Discontinuities.
Working Paper. (Schultz, Mouw, & Kalleberg)Abstract
A primary obstacle to the study of work and family trajectories across the life course is incorporating detailed longitudinal work histories on employer changes, occupation changes, and job characteristics into the analysis. We develop a measure of career continuity across employer and occupational changes to overcome this obstacle. The central element in our measure of career continuity is the operationalization of occupational internal labor markets (OILMs), or clusters of jobs linked together across detailed occupations that are associated with the development of skills. We measure OILMs using data on occupational mobility from matched samples of the Current Population Survey (CPS) and data on multiple dimensions of job skills from the O*NET. Our results show women experience more OILM career discontinuities then men, particularly after childbirth. We find that OILM career discontinuities, and not employer changes, are the primary explanation for the motherhood wage penalty.
Low-Wage Work & Poverty
Abstract
How are changes in the low-wage labor market affecting the mobility of workers out of low-wage work? I investigate changes in the wage mobility of workers starting employment spells in low wages using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1968 to 2014 and discrete-time event history analysis. About half of all low-wage workers move to better wages within four years. Effects on mobility rates are significant by age, gender, race, education, occupation, and job characteristics. Mobility rates out of low-wage work have declined since the late 1990s. Little progress has been made in closing the gaps in mobility for women and nonwhites over time. I find evidence for the decline of firm internal labor markets and lower mobility for part-time workers over time.
Abstract
Although eighty percent of low-wage workers are not in poverty, low-wage work and poverty are often conflated. I distinguish the two and investigate how household conditions affect workers’ mobility out of low-wage work. I argue households are central labor market organizations, parallel to firms, occupations, and unions in explaining labor market inequality. I define households as contested and resourced organizations. I operationalize the contested part of households by investigating how falling into poverty affects low-wage worker’s mobility. I argue that falling into poverty introduces new search frictions as settled patterns of household tasks are re-negotiated. These new search frictions limit mobility consistent with the theory of dynamic monopsony. I operationalize the resourced part of households using 3-year post-tax and transfer income and liquid savings. I analyze data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics using discrete-time event history analysis. My results are consistent with household search frictions explain the lower mobility of households falling to poverty. First, workers with larger income drops when falling into poverty move to better wages at lower rates. Second, sixty percent of the effect of a household being in poverty in the previous year on a low-wage worker’s mobility is explained by a lack of household resources. Households with longer durations in poverty are characterized by a diminishment of household resources.
- A related Equitable Growth Blog Post
- Michigan SRC PSID Seminar Presentation – Sept. 30, 2021
Place and Persistence of Poverty: Trends in Urban, Suburban, and Rural Communities
Working Paper. (Schultz & Allard)Abstract
Persistent poverty is typically defined as a place with a continuously high poverty rate. An alternative approach is to measure persistent poverty at the household level. Households experiencing more than five years in poverty are considered in persistent poverty. Analyzing persistent poverty at the household-level allows for the investigation of variation across places, in particular the difference between places with similar poverty rates, but different amounts of households in short vs long poverty spells. I use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and analyze variation in persistent poverty by community type and region. I find that the highest percentage of households in persistent poverty are in rural communities in the South and North Central regions. In these two regions, poverty rates have remained high since the 1990s. Persistent poverty is comparatively low across community types in the Northeast and West regions but increased in recent decades. Rates of persistent poverty are higher among Black households than white households and this is particularly the case in the rural South.
Other Studies of Inequality Over the Life Course
The Long Shadow of Mass Incarceration: Race, Incarceration, and Social Security Earnings.
Working Paper (Schultz & Gutierrez)Abstract
Mass incarceration is a major social program of the past 50 years in the U.S. with broad impacts for race and class inequalities for incarcerated individuals, their children, families, and communities. The cohorts of men coming of age at the beginning of mass incarceration are now approaching retirement age. We investigate the long-term shadow of incarceration in early adulthood across the life course and into later life. Drawing on longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we examine the extent to which incarceration impacts Social Security earnings and racial inequality among individuals of retirement age. We then investigate prominent explanations for this inequality including labor market experience and criminal legal system contact across life course. Our final analysis seeks to estimate the cost of mass incarceration in terms of lost Social Security earnings. We find that mass incarceration has a long afterlife. The cohorts who experienced the height of mass incarceration will reach retirement age in the next two decades with large consequences for inequality in later life.
Occupational Age Structures and Wage Inequality.
Working Paper (Schultz & Johfre)Abstract
Are occupations systematically age-structured, and if so, does it matter for workers’ wages? Sociological theories explain how organizations and occupations create inequality along the axis of gender, race, and social class. Yet, studies of age inequality in the labor market operate at the individual level (e.g. a proxy for skills or maturity) or as a macro-demographic characteristic (e.g. population aging). We study age at the meso-level by applying functional principal component analysis to the complete age distributions of 525 occupations in the 2023 American Community Survey and clustering occupations in the resulting component space. This yields four distinct occupational age structures, which we find are patterned by but not reducible to occupations’ gender, racial, or educational composition. Then, using data from workers from the Current Population Survey, we find these structures predict workers’ wages net of a wide set of individual and occupational controls. Furthermore, a worker’s own age relative to their occupation’s typical age carries an independent predictive effect on wage, consistent with an ideal-age norm operating within occupations.
