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Job loss is an involuntary disruptive life event with a far-reaching impact on workers' life trajectories. Its incidence among growing segments of the workforce, alongside the recent era of severe economic upheaval, has increased attention to the effects of job loss and unemployment. As a relatively exogenous labor market shock, the study of displacement enables robust estimates of associations between socioeconomic circumstances and life outcomes. Research suggests that displacement is associated with subsequent unemployment, long-term earnings losses, and lower job quality; declines in psychological and physical well-being; loss of psychosocial assets; social withdrawal; family disruption; and lower levels of children's attainment and well-being. Although reemployment mitigates some of the negative effects of job loss, it does not eliminate them. Contexts of widespread unemployment, although associated with larger economic losses, lessen the social-psychological impact of job loss. Future research should attend more fully to how the economic and social-psychological effects of displacement intersect and extend beyond displaced workers themselves.

Given the recent era of economic upheaval, studying the effects of job displacement has seldom been so timely and consequential. Despite a large literature associating displacement with worker well-being, relatively few studies focus on the effects of parental displacement on child well-being, and fewer still focus on implications for children of single-parent households. Moreover, notwithstanding a large literature on the relationship between single motherhood and children's outcomes, research on intergenerational effects of involuntary employment separations among single mothers is limited. Using 30 years of nationally representative panel data and propensity score matching methods, the authors find significant negative effects of job displacement among single mothers on children's educational attainment and social-psychological well-being in young adulthood. Effects are concentrated among older children and children whose mothers had a low likelihood of displacement, suggesting an important role for social stigma and relative deprivation in the effects of socioeconomic shocks on child well-being.

Disruptive events such as economic recessions, natural disasters, job loss, and divorce are highly prevalent among American families. These events can have a long-lasting impact when experienced during childhood, potentially altering academic achievement, socioemotional well-being, health and development, and later life socioeconomic status. Much research has considered the overall impact of disruptive events on children’s lives, but the consequences of disruption also vary across groups. The same event may have profound negative consequences for some groups, minor or no impact for others, and even be a generative or positive turning point for other groups. This issue focuses on the disparate consequences of disruptive events on children. We consider theoretical approaches accounting for effect heterogeneity and methodological challenges in identifying unequal impacts. We also review an emerging multidisciplinary literature accounting for variation in the impact of disruption across several widely studied domains that affect children’s life chances, including economic, household, educational, health, and environmental events.

Individuals do not respond uniformly to treatments, such as events or interventions. Sociologists routinely partition samples into subgroups to explore how the effects of treatments vary by selected covariates, such as race and gender, on the basis of theoretical priors. Data-driven discoveries are also routine, yet the analyses by which sociologists typically go about them are often problematic and seldom move us beyond our biases to explore new meaningful subgroups. Emerging machine learning methods based on decision trees allow researchers to explore sources of variation that they may not have previously considered or envisaged. In this article, the authors use tree-based machine learning, that is, causal trees, to recursively partition the sample to uncover sources of effect heterogeneity. Assessing a central topic in social inequality, college effects on wages, the authors compare what is learned from covariate and propensity score–based partitioning approaches with recursive partitioning based on causal trees. Decision trees, although superseded by forests for estimation, can be used to uncover subpopulations responsive to treatments. Using observational data, the authors expand on the existing causal tree literature by applying leaf-specific effect estimation strategies to adjust for observed confounding, including inverse propensity weighting, nearest neighbor matching, and doubly robust causal forests. We also assess localized balance metrics and sensitivity analyses to address the possibility of differential imbalance and unobserved confounding. The authors encourage researchers to follow similar data exploration practices in their work on variation in sociological effects and offer a straightforward framework by which to do so.

Mechanisms explaining the negative effects of parental divorce on children's attainment have long been conjectured and assessed. Yet few studies of parental divorce have carefully attended to the assumptions and methods necessary to estimate causal mediation effects. Applying a causal framework to linked U.S. panel data, we assess the degree to which parental divorce limits children's education among whites and nonwhites and whether observed lower levels of educational attainment are explained by postdivorce family conditions and children's skills. Our analyses yield three key findings. First, the negative effect of divorce on educational attainment, particularly college, is substantial for white children; by contrast, divorce does not lower the educational attainment of nonwhite children. Second, declines in family income explain as much as one- to two-thirds of the negative effect of parental divorce on white children's education. Family instability also helps explain the effect, particularly when divorce occurs in early childhood. Children's psychosocial skills explain about one-fifth of the effect, whereas children's cognitive skills play a minimal role. Third, among nonwhites, the minimal total effect on education is explained by the offsetting influence of postdivorce declines in family income and stability alongside increases in children's psychosocial and cognitive skills.

Previous research has shown that involuntary job loss may have negative health consequences, but existing analyses have not adequately adjusted for health selection or other confounding factors that could reveal the association to be spurious. Using two large, population-based longitudinal samples of U.S. workers from the Americans' Changing Lives Study and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, this analysis goes further by using respondents' self-reports of the reasons for job loss and information about the timing of job losses and acute negative health shocks to distinguish health-related job losses from other involuntary job losses. Results suggest that even after adjustment for numerous social background characteristics and baseline health, involuntary job loss is associated with significantly poorer overall self-rated health and more depressive symptoms. More nuanced analyses reveal that among involuntary job losers, those who lose their jobs for health-related reasons have, not surprisingly, the most precipitous declines in health. Job losses for other reasons have substantive and statistically significant effects on depressive symptoms, while effects on self-rated poor health are relatively small.

In this article, we consider how the economic return to a college education varies across members of the U.S. population. Based on principles of comparative advantage, scholars commonly presume that positive selection is at work, that is, individuals who are most likely to select into college also benefit most from college. Net of observed economic and noneconomic factors influencing college attendance, we conjecture that individuals who are least likely to obtain a college education benefit the most from college. We call this theory the negative selection hypothesis. To adjudicate between the two hypotheses, we study the effects of completing college on earnings by propensity score strata using an innovative hierarchical linear model with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. For both cohorts, for both men and women, and for every observed stage of the life course, we find evidence suggesting negative selection. Results from auxiliary analyses lend further support to the negative selection hypothesis.

Children whose parents divorce tend to have worse educational outcomes than children whose parents stay married. However, not all children respond identically to their parents divorcing. We focus on how the impact of parental divorce on children’s education varies by how likely or unlikely divorce was for those parents. We find a significant negative effect of parental divorce on educational attainment, particularly college attendance and completion, among children whose parents were unlikely to divorce. Families expecting marital stability, unprepared for disruption, may experience considerable adjustment difficulties when divorce occurs, leading to negative outcomes for children. By contrast, we find no effect of parental divorce among children whose parents were likely to divorce. Children of high-risk marriages, who face many social disadvantages over childhood irrespective of parental marital status, may anticipate or otherwise accommodate to the dissolution of their parents’ marriage. Our results suggest that family disruption does not uniformly disrupt children’s attainment.

Despite the special role of tenure-track faculty in society, training future researchers and producing scholarship that drives scientific and technological innovation, the sociodemographic characteristics of the professoriate have never been representative of the general population. Here we systematically investigate the indicators of faculty childhood socioeconomic status and consider how they may limit efforts to diversify the professoriate. Combining national-level data on education, income and university rankings with a 2017–2020 survey of 7,204 US-based tenure-track faculty across eight disciplines in STEM, social science and the humanities, we show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years. Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged, which is likely to deeply shape their scholarship and their reproduction.Studying socioeconomic backgrounds and intergenerational transmission in the US academia, Morgan et al. find that faculty have a parent with a Ph.D. degree a striking 25 times more often than the general population.

The college-educated are more likely to vote than are those with less education. Prior research suggests that the effect of college attendance on voting operates directly, by increasing an individual’s interest and engagement in politics through social networks or human capital accumulation. College may also increase voting indirectly by leading to degree attainment and increasing socioeconomic status, thus facilitating political participation. However, few studies have empirically tested these direct and indirect pathways or examined how these effects vary across individuals. To bridge this gap, we employ a nonparametric causal mediation analysis to examine the total, direct, and indirect effects of college attendance on voting and how these effects differ across individuals with different propensities of attending college. Using data from the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, we find large direct effects of college on self-reported voting and comparably smaller indirect effects that operate through degree completion and socioeconomic attainment. We find the largest impact of college on voting for individuals unlikely to attend, a pattern due primarily to heterogeneity in the direct effect of college. Our findings suggest that civic returns to college are not contingent upon degree completion or socioeconomic returns. An exclusive focus on the economic returns to college can mask the broader societal benefits of expanding higher education to disadvantaged youth.