publications
2024
- Intergenerational Social Mobility Among the Children of Immigrants in Western Europe: Between Socioeconomic Assimilation and DisadvantageMauricio Bucca , and Lucas G DrouhotSociological Science, 2024
Are Western European countries successfully incorporating their immigrant populations? We approach immigrant incorporation as a process of intergenerational social mobility and argue that mobility trajectories are uniquely suited to gauge the influence of immigrant origins on life chances. We compare trajectories of absolute intergenerational mobility among second generation and native populations using nationally representative data in seven European countries and report two major findings. First, we document a master trend of native–immigrant similarity in mobility trajectories, suggesting that the destiny of the second generation — like that of their native counterpart — is primarily determined by parental social class rather than immigrant background per se. Secondly, disaggregating results by regional origins reveals heterogeneous mobility outcomes. On one hand, certain origin groups are at heightened risks of stagnation in the service class when originating from there and face some disadvantage in attaining the top social class in adulthood when originating from lower classes. On the other hand, we observe a pattern of second-generation advantage, whereby certain origin groups are more likely to experience some degree of upward mobility. Altogether, these results suggest that immigrant origins per se do not strongly constrain the socioeconomic destiny of the second generation in Western Europe.
- Colorism Revisited: The Effects of Skin Color on Educational and Labor Market Outcomes in the United StatesMauricio BuccaSociological Science, 2024
Studies of colorism—the idea that racial hierarchies coexist with gradational inequalities based on skin color—consistently find that darker skin correlates with lower socioeconomic outcomes. Despite the causal nature of this debate, evidence remains predominantly associational. This study revisits the colorism literature by proposing a causal model underlying these theories. It discusses conditions under which associations may reflect contemporary causal effects of skin color and evaluates strategies for identifying these effects. Using data from the AddHealth and NLSY97 surveys and applying two identification strategies, the study estimates the causal effects of skin color on college degree attainment, personal earnings, and family income among White, Black, and Hispanic populations in the United States. Results show that darker skin correlates with poorer educational and economic outcomes within racial groups. However, evidence of contemporary causal effects of skin color is partial, limited to college attainment of Whites and family income of Hispanics. For Blacks, results suggest a generalized penalty associated with being Black rather than gradation based on skin tone. Methodologically, the article advocates using sensitivity analyses to account for unobserved confounders in models for skin color effects and uses sibling fixed-effects as a secondary complementary strategy.
- Are Within-Racial Group Inequalities by Skin Color Really Greater Than Inequalities Between Racial Groups in the United States?Mauricio BuccaSocius, 2024
The author examines the relationship between skin color and educational and labor market outcomes within White, Black, and Hispanic populations in the United States. By analyzing National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 data, the author challenges claims that intraracial inequalities on the basis of skin color match or surpass inequalities among ethnoracial groups. The findings indicate that although a darker skin tone correlates with less favorable outcomes across all ethnoracial groups, disparities along the color continuum within the Black population are less pronounced than those between Blacks and Whites as a whole. For Hispanics, the significance of between- and within-race inequality varies depending on the outcome. These insights remain consistent both in descriptive analysis and after adjusting for socioeconomic origins.
- Marrying across Borders in Latin America: Visualizing Intermarriage FlowsAdriana Robles, Luca Maria Pesando, Alejandra Abufhele, and 2 more authorsSocius, 2024
The authors propose an adaptation of the well-known “circular plot,” traditionally used to quantify international migration flows, to visualize patterns of intermarriage within Latin American countries. The authors present data on intermarriage flows between partners’ countries of origin using data from recent household surveys from five Latin American countries. The visualization allows an easy-to-grasp snapshot of marital pairings considering partners born in different countries, as well as the identification of their spatial patterns. In some countries, such as Colombia and Peru, most intermarriage occurs between natives and Venezuelans. Conversely, in Chile, Ecuador, and Uruguay, there is much wider heterogeneity in country-pair combinations. In Chile, no country-pair combination dominates, reflecting the more balanced nature of migration flows from a broader set of countries. Overall, the results aid the interpretation of trends and patterns in marriage across country lines by placing them within a comparative regional context. This is a flexible tool that could be easily adapted to multiple other countries within or outside of the region, to analyses over time, and to a heterogeneous array of couple-level characteristics.
2021
- Lasso regularization for selection of log-linear models: An application to educational assortative matingMauricio Bucca , and Daniela R UrbinaSociological Methods & Research, 2021
Log-linear models for contingency tables are a key tool for the study of categorical inequalities in sociology. However, the conventional approach to model selection and specification suffers from at least two limitations: reliance on oftentimes equivocal diagnostics yielded by fit statistics, and the inability to identify patterns of association not covered by model candidates. In this article, we propose an application of Lasso regularization that addresses the aforementioned limitations. We evaluate our method through a Monte Carlo experiment and an empirical study of educational assortative mating in Chile, 1990–2015. Results demonstrate that our approach has the virtue, relative to ad hoc specification searches, of offering a principled statistical criterion to inductively select a model. Importantly, we show that in situations where conventional fit statistics provide conflicting diagnostics, our Lasso-based approach is consistent in its model choice, yielding solutions that are both predictive and parsimonious.
2020
- Heatmaps for patterns of association in log-linear modelsMauricio BuccaSocius, 2020
Log-linear models offer a detailed characterization of the association between categorical variables, but the breadth of their outputs is difficult to grasp because of the large number of parameters these models entail. Revisiting seminal findings and data from sociological work on social mobility, the author illustrates the use of heatmaps as a visualization technique to convey the complex patterns of association captured by log-linear models. In particular, turning log odds ratios derived from a model’s predicted counts into heatmaps makes it possible to summarize large amounts of information and facilitates comparison across models’ outcomes.
2019
- It’s not just how the game is played, it’s whether you win or loseMario D Molina, Mauricio Bucca, and Michael W MacyScience Advances, 2019
Growing disparities of income and wealth have prompted extensive survey research to measure the effects on public beliefs about the causes and fairness of economic inequality. However, observational data confound responses to unequal outcomes with highly correlated inequality of opportunity. This study uses a novel experiment to disentangle the effects of unequal outcomes and unequal opportunities on cognitive, normative, and affective responses. Participants were randomly assigned to positions with unequal opportunities for success. Results showed that both winners and losers were less likely to view the outcomes as fair or attributable to skill as the level of redistribution increased, but this effect of redistribution was stronger for winners. Moreover, winners were generally more likely to believe that the game was fair, even when the playing field was most heavily tilted in their favor. In short, it’s not just how the game is played, it’s also whether you win or lose.
2016
- Merit and blame in unequal societies: Explaining Latin Americans’ beliefs about wealth and povertyMauricio BuccaResearch in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2016
Popular beliefs about the causes of inequality are often thought to reflect the actual processes behind social stratification. We use the case of Latin America to challenge this assumption. In these rigid and unequal societies, people are more likely to believe that wealth and poverty depend on individual merits or faults rather than structural constraints. Drawing on data from the 2007 Social Cohesion Survey, we use multinomial logistic regression and counterfactual simulation to investigate the factors that drive popular beliefs about wealth and poverty at the individual level, as well its distribution across countries. Our findings provide partial support to theories maintaining that being in an advantaged social position leads to favoring individualistic beliefs. We, however, report a novel effect of social class. More importantly, we show that unobserved country-level factors are the most powerful predictors and the only source of cross-country variation in the distribution of beliefs about the origins of inequality, thus ruling out a compositional explanation for cross-country heterogeneity.
- Long work hours, part-time work, and trends in the gender gap in pay, the motherhood wage penalty, and the fatherhood wage premiumKim A Weeden , Youngjoo Cha, and Mauricio BuccaRSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2016
We assess how changes in the social organization and compensation of work hours over the last three decades are associated with changes in wage differentials among mothers, fathers, childless women, and childless men. We find that large differences between gender and parental status groups in long work hours (fifty or more per week), coupled with sharply rising hourly wages for long work hours, contributed to rising gender gaps in wages (especially among parents), motherhood wage penalties, and fatherhood wage premiums. Changes in the representation of these groups in part-time work, by contrast, is associated with a decline in the gender gap in wages among parents and in the motherhood wage penalty, but an increase in the fatherhood wage premium. These findings offer important clues into why gender and family wage differentials still persist.