Daniel Oesch
Biographic Data
| ID | 118310 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Oesch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Oesch |
| SIGNATURE | OESCH D |
| AFFILIATIONS | FORS – Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1704-853X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
No Stalled Revolution: The Closing Gender Gap in Early Careers in Europe and the United States
Women have surpassed men in higher education, yet their labor market progress relative to men is widely seen as stalled. We address this apparent contradiction by adopting a cohort perspective—since gender convergence is driven by cohort replacement rather than period effects—and focusing on early careers (ages 25–34), before parenthood widens the gender gap. Drawing on large-scale national data spanning several decades, we analyze single-year bi…
Uneven shifts: The geography of occupational change in France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, 1992–2018
Amid renewed interest in geographical inequalities in life chances and an ongoing debate about occupational upgrading versus polarisation, we investigate how the occupational structure changed across NUTS-2 regions in France, Italy, Spain and the UK between 1992 and 2018. Against the expectation that national upgrading trends may mask a diversity of regional upgrading, downgrading and polarisation experiences, EU Labour Force Survey data show cle…
Occupational earning potential: A new measure of social hierarchy in Europe and the US
Social stratification is interested in unequal life chances and assumes the existence of a hierarchy of more or less advantageous occupations. Yet occupations are not easily translated into a linear hierarchical measure. Influential scales combine multiple indicators and lack intuitive interpretation. We therefore present a new scale based on occupations’ earnings potential (OEP). OEP measures the median earnings of occupations and expresses them…
The Myth of the Middle Class Squeeze: Employment and Income by Class in Six Western Countries, 1980–2020
The public debate portrays the middle class as the big losers in recent decades, while people above and below seemingly fared better in terms of employment and income growth. This narrative is both conceptually and empirically flawed. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study 1980–2020, we show for France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US that middle-class employment expanded, while the working class shrank. The middle class also experienced…
Subjective social class has a bad name, but predicts life chances well
Over the last decades, the study of subjective class has been eclipsed by research on objective class. The recurrent mismatch between subjective and objective class has led to the common wisdom that self-reported class is a poor measure of people’s life chances. This article questions this common wisdom. Based on ISSP 2009 and 2019, it shows for 55 country surveys that a pre-coded question on subjective class accounts for more variance in life ch…
The Intergenerational Transmission of Family Dissolution: How it Varies by Social Class Origin and Birth Cohort
Children from separated parents are more likely to also experience the dissolution of their own union. For many children, parental separation thus is an adverse life course event that follows them into adulthood. We examine whether parents’ social class mitigates this adversity and weakens the intergenerational transmission of family dissolution for children from advantaged class origins. This is the case if separated parents with more resources …
A Decline in the Social Status of the Working Class? Conflicting Evidence for 8 Western Countries, 1987–2017
The consensus view among political scientists is that the subjective social status of low-skilled workers has declined over the last decades, and this status loss of the working class is seen as contributing to the rise of the radical right. We examine the micro-foundation of this claim by tracing the evolution of subjective status for different social classes in Europe and the US. We use all available survey rounds of the International Social Su…
The effect of unemployment on couples separating in Germany and the UK
Objective This article examines how unemployment affects the separation risk of heterosexual coresiding couples, depending on couples' household income and whether men or women become unemployed. Background Unemployment may decrease the separation risk as a drop in resources makes separation more costly—or it may increase the separation risk if unemployment creates stress and reduces the quality of couple relations. Moreover, unemployment may be …
No Stratified Effect of Unemployment on Incomes: How the Market, State, and Household Compensate for Income Loss in the United Kingdom and Switzerland
Unemployment is a critical life event that may affect the income trajectories of displaced workers very unequally. It may lead to cumulative disadvantage and hit vulnerable groups hardest. Alternatively, it may level the playing field because higher classes have more to lose. We analyse heterogeneous effects of unemployment on income for the United Kingdom and Switzerland, using two household panels-Understanding Society 2009-2017 and the Swiss H…
Discrimination in the hiring of older jobseekers: Combining a survey experiment with a natural experiment in Switzerland
The Polarization Myth: Occupational Upgrading in Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, 1992-2015
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 t…
The Gender Wage Gap Opens Long before Motherhood. Panel Evidence on Early Careers in Switzerland
According to a popular argument in economics, the gender wage gap persists not because of employer discrimination against women, but because of the differential investment of fathers and mothers into paid work and the household. We test this argument by comparing the evolution of wages between men and women before the onset of family formation and gendered household specialization. We use a cohort study of young adults for Switzerland (TREE 2000–…
Electoral competition in Europe's new tripolar political space: Class voting for the left, centre‐right and radical right
The rise of the radical right fundamentally changes the face of electoral competition in Western Europe. Bipolar competition is becoming tripolar, as the two dominant party poles of the twentieth century – the left and the centre‐right – are challenged by a third pole of the radical right. Between 2000 and 2015, the radical right has secured more than 12 per cent of the vote in over ten Western European countries. This article shows how electoral…
Is Employment Polarisation Inevitable? Occupational Change in Ireland and Switzerland, 1970-2010
The routinisation thesis expects technology to hollow out the middle of the employment structure, leading to a uniform pattern of polarisation across affluent countries. This article argues that occupational change is also shaped by labour supply - particularly education and immigration - and institutions. Polarisation therefore represents just one scenario of occupational change. Our study of Ireland and Switzerland examines long-term change in …
The Working Class Left Behind? The Class Gap in Life Satisfaction in Germany and Switzerland Over the Last Decades
The 1990s and 2000s were a gloomy period for Germany’s working class, hit by mass unemployment, welfare retrenchment and wage stagnation. We examine whether the growing economic disparity between the top and the bottom of Germany’s class structure was accompanied by a widening class gap in life satisfaction. We analyse whether there is a social class gradient in life satisfaction and whether, over the last decades, this class gradient increased i…
The wage penalty for motherhood: Evidence on discrimination from panel data and a survey experiment for Switzerland
Survey-based research finds a sizeable unexplained wage gap between mothers and nonmothers in affluent countries. The source of this wage gap is unclear: It can stem either from the unobserved effects of motherhood on productivity or from employer discrimi
Social Networks and Job Access for the Unemployed: Work Ties for the Upper-Middle Class, Communal Ties for the Working Class
In Europe, almost half of all jobs are found through personal contacts such as colleagues, family, or friends. We analyse whether personal contacts facilitate access to jobs for the middle or the working class. We do not treat informal ties as a homogeneous category, but distinguish work-related contacts from communal contacts such as family, friends, and acquaintances. Our analysis is based on a longitudinal survey of unemployed jobseekers in Sw…
The Feminization of Occupations and Change in Wages: A Panel Analysis of Britain, Germany, and Switzerland
In the past four decades, women have made major inroads into occupations previously dominated by men. This paper examines whether occupational feminization is accompanied by a decline in wages: Do workers suffer a wage penalty if they remain in, or move into, feminizing occupations? We analyze this question over the 1990s and 2000s in Britain, Germany, and Switzerland, using longitudinal panel data to estimate individual fixed effects for men and…
Occupational Structure and Labor Market Change in Western Europe since 1990
Observers of social change have been fascinated for a long time by the question of how the employment structure evolves: toward good jobs, bad jobs, or increasing polarization? Three issues are at stake. At the microlevel of single jobs, the concern is with the quality of new employment created. The question raised is to know whether jobs are becoming better paid, more highly skilled, and endowed with greater autonomy. At the macrolevel of social…
The Politics of Advanced Capitalism
This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democraci…
Smooth transition or permanent exit? Evidence on job prospects of displaced industrial workers
This article examines the job prospects of displaced industrial workers in Switzerland. Based on a survey of 1,203 workers who were dismissed after their manufacturing plants closed down, we analyse the determinants of re-employment, the sector of re-employment and the change in wages. Two years after displacement, a majority of workers were back in employment: 69% were re-employed, 17% un-employed and 11% retired. Amongst re-employed workers, tw…
Welfare regimes and change in the employment structure: Britain, Denmark and Germany since 1990
Welfare states are often reduced to their role as providers of social protection and redistribution. In 1990, Esping-Andersen argued that they also affect employment creation and the class structure. We analyse the stratification outcomes for three welfare regimes – Britain, Germany and Denmark – over the 1990s and 2000s. Based on individual-level surveys, we observe a disproportionate increase among professionals and managers, and a decline amon…
Occupational Change in Europe: How Technology and Education Transform the Job Structure
'Occupational Change in Europe' examines the pattern of occupational change in Western Europe by drawing on extensive evidence of employment data in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Switzerland since 1990.
Does Unemployment Hurt Less if There is More of it Around? A Panel Analysis of Life Satisfaction in Germany and Switzerland
This article examines the existence of a habituation effect to unemployment: Does the subjective well-being of unemployed people decline less if unemployment is more widespread? The underlying idea is that unemployment hysteresis may operate through a sociological channel: if many people in the community lose their job and remain unemployed over an extended period, the psychological cost of being unemployed diminishes, and the pressure to accept …
Upgrading or polarization? Occupational change in Britain, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, 1990-2008
Journal Article Upgrading or polarization? Occupational change in Britain, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, 1990-2008 Get access Daniel Oesch, Daniel Oesch * 1University of Lausanne, Switzerland *Correspondence: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jorge Rodríguez Menés Jorge Rodríguez Menés 2University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic …
Explaining Workers' Support for Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland
During the 1990s, the working class has become the core clientele of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe. This article empirically examines the motives of workers for supporting a right-wing populist party. Based on data from the European Social Survey for Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland, three different sets of explanations are tested: (1) hypotheses stressing economic determinants, that is, the fear of wage pressure …
Electoral competition in Europe's new tripolar political space: Class voting for the left, centre‐right and radical right
The rise of the radical right fundamentally changes the face of electoral competition in Western Europe. Bipolar competition is becoming tripolar, as the two dominant party poles of the twentieth century – the left and the centre‐right – are challenged by a third pole of the radical right. Between 2000 and 2015, the radical right has secured more than 12 per cent of the vote in over ten Western European countries. This article shows how electoral…
Coming to Grips with a Changing Class Structure: An Analysis of Employment Stratification in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland
Over the last 30 years, trends such as service sector growth, welfare state expansion and rising female participation rates have promoted increasing heterogeneity within the occupational system. Accordingly, this article argues that the class map has to be redrawn in order to grasp these changes in the employment structure. For that purpose, it develops the bases of a new class schema that partly shifts its focus from hierarchical divisions to ho…
Upgrading or polarization? Occupational change in Britain, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, 1990-2008
Journal Article Upgrading or polarization? Occupational change in Britain, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, 1990-2008 Get access Daniel Oesch, Daniel Oesch * 1University of Lausanne, Switzerland *Correspondence: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jorge Rodríguez Menés Jorge Rodríguez Menés 2University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic …
The Polarization Myth: Occupational Upgrading in Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, 1992-2015
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 t…
The Changing Shape of Class Voting
In the 1990s, sociologists engaged in a heated controversy about class voting. Although empirical evidence accumulated, positions remained surprisingly divided. This paper argues that this disagreement is due to two factors. Firstly, it reflects diverging understandings as to the concept of class voting. Secondly, it is explained by the use of class models that do not satisfactorily represent today's social stratification in Western Europe. In co…
Does Unemployment Hurt Less if There is More of it Around? A Panel Analysis of Life Satisfaction in Germany and Switzerland
This article examines the existence of a habituation effect to unemployment: Does the subjective well-being of unemployed people decline less if unemployment is more widespread? The underlying idea is that unemployment hysteresis may operate through a sociological channel: if many people in the community lose their job and remain unemployed over an extended period, the psychological cost of being unemployed diminishes, and the pressure to accept …
The Class Basis of Switzerland's Cleavage between the New Left and the Populist Right
This article argues that a full grown cleavage has surfaced in Swiss politics, separating a libertarian‐universalistic (the New Left) from a traditionalist‐communitarian camp (the Populist Right). Based on survey data of Switzerland's parliamentary election 2007, it examines the cleavage's micro‐foundations and shows that the class constituencies of the New Left (the Social‐Democratic and Green Parties) and the Populist Right (the Swiss People's …
A Decline in the Social Status of the Working Class? Conflicting Evidence for 8 Western Countries, 1987–2017
The consensus view among political scientists is that the subjective social status of low-skilled workers has declined over the last decades, and this status loss of the working class is seen as contributing to the rise of the radical right. We examine the micro-foundation of this claim by tracing the evolution of subjective status for different social classes in Europe and the US. We use all available survey rounds of the International Social Su…
Subjective social class has a bad name, but predicts life chances well
Over the last decades, the study of subjective class has been eclipsed by research on objective class. The recurrent mismatch between subjective and objective class has led to the common wisdom that self-reported class is a poor measure of people’s life chances. This article questions this common wisdom. Based on ISSP 2009 and 2019, it shows for 55 country surveys that a pre-coded question on subjective class accounts for more variance in life ch…
The wage penalty for motherhood: Evidence on discrimination from panel data and a survey experiment for Switzerland
Survey-based research finds a sizeable unexplained wage gap between mothers and nonmothers in affluent countries. The source of this wage gap is unclear: It can stem either from the unobserved effects of motherhood on productivity or from employer discrimi
Is Employment Polarisation Inevitable? Occupational Change in Ireland and Switzerland, 1970-2010
The routinisation thesis expects technology to hollow out the middle of the employment structure, leading to a uniform pattern of polarisation across affluent countries. This article argues that occupational change is also shaped by labour supply - particularly education and immigration - and institutions. Polarisation therefore represents just one scenario of occupational change. Our study of Ireland and Switzerland examines long-term change in …
Smooth transition or permanent exit? Evidence on job prospects of displaced industrial workers
This article examines the job prospects of displaced industrial workers in Switzerland. Based on a survey of 1,203 workers who were dismissed after their manufacturing plants closed down, we analyse the determinants of re-employment, the sector of re-employment and the change in wages. Two years after displacement, a majority of workers were back in employment: 69% were re-employed, 17% un-employed and 11% retired. Amongst re-employed workers, tw…
Welfare regimes and change in the employment structure: Britain, Denmark and Germany since 1990
Welfare states are often reduced to their role as providers of social protection and redistribution. In 1990, Esping-Andersen argued that they also affect employment creation and the class structure. We analyse the stratification outcomes for three welfare regimes – Britain, Germany and Denmark – over the 1990s and 2000s. Based on individual-level surveys, we observe a disproportionate increase among professionals and managers, and a decline amon…
The Gender Wage Gap Opens Long before Motherhood. Panel Evidence on Early Careers in Switzerland
According to a popular argument in economics, the gender wage gap persists not because of employer discrimination against women, but because of the differential investment of fathers and mothers into paid work and the household. We test this argument by comparing the evolution of wages between men and women before the onset of family formation and gendered household specialization. We use a cohort study of young adults for Switzerland (TREE 2000–…
Social Networks and Job Access for the Unemployed: Work Ties for the Upper-Middle Class, Communal Ties for the Working Class
In Europe, almost half of all jobs are found through personal contacts such as colleagues, family, or friends. We analyse whether personal contacts facilitate access to jobs for the middle or the working class. We do not treat informal ties as a homogeneous category, but distinguish work-related contacts from communal contacts such as family, friends, and acquaintances. Our analysis is based on a longitudinal survey of unemployed jobseekers in Sw…
No Stratified Effect of Unemployment on Incomes: How the Market, State, and Household Compensate for Income Loss in the United Kingdom and Switzerland
Unemployment is a critical life event that may affect the income trajectories of displaced workers very unequally. It may lead to cumulative disadvantage and hit vulnerable groups hardest. Alternatively, it may level the playing field because higher classes have more to lose. We analyse heterogeneous effects of unemployment on income for the United Kingdom and Switzerland, using two household panels-Understanding Society 2009-2017 and the Swiss H…
Discrimination in the hiring of older jobseekers: Combining a survey experiment with a natural experiment in Switzerland
The Working Class Left Behind? The Class Gap in Life Satisfaction in Germany and Switzerland Over the Last Decades
The 1990s and 2000s were a gloomy period for Germany’s working class, hit by mass unemployment, welfare retrenchment and wage stagnation. We examine whether the growing economic disparity between the top and the bottom of Germany’s class structure was accompanied by a widening class gap in life satisfaction. We analyse whether there is a social class gradient in life satisfaction and whether, over the last decades, this class gradient increased i…
The Myth of the Middle Class Squeeze: Employment and Income by Class in Six Western Countries, 1980–2020
The public debate portrays the middle class as the big losers in recent decades, while people above and below seemingly fared better in terms of employment and income growth. This narrative is both conceptually and empirically flawed. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study 1980–2020, we show for France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US that middle-class employment expanded, while the working class shrank. The middle class also experienced…
Weniger Koordination, mehr Markt? Kollektive Arbeitsbeziehungen und Neokorporatismus in der Schweiz seit 1990
Dieser Beitrag diskutiert die These, wonach sich die industriellen Beziehungen in der Schweiz weg vom koordinierten rheinischen hin zum marktorientierten angelsächsischen Modell bewegten. Die Koordination zwischen Arbeitgeberverbänden und Gewerkschaften wird erstens im Bereich der kollektiven Arbeitsbeziehungen sowie zweitens in der Politikgestaltung untersucht. In einem dritten Schritt wird die Entwicklung der Repräsentationsmacht der Verbände s…
Uneven shifts: The geography of occupational change in France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, 1992–2018
Amid renewed interest in geographical inequalities in life chances and an ongoing debate about occupational upgrading versus polarisation, we investigate how the occupational structure changed across NUTS-2 regions in France, Italy, Spain and the UK between 1992 and 2018. Against the expectation that national upgrading trends may mask a diversity of regional upgrading, downgrading and polarisation experiences, EU Labour Force Survey data show cle…
The Intergenerational Transmission of Family Dissolution: How it Varies by Social Class Origin and Birth Cohort
Children from separated parents are more likely to also experience the dissolution of their own union. For many children, parental separation thus is an adverse life course event that follows them into adulthood. We examine whether parents’ social class mitigates this adversity and weakens the intergenerational transmission of family dissolution for children from advantaged class origins. This is the case if separated parents with more resources …
What explains the Differences in the Tax Burden Between Swiss Cantons
In the present article, we empirically analyse a series of competing hypothesis that try to account for the considerable disparity in the tax burden between Swiss cantons. Three hypotheses focus on differences in spending levels: The first explains differences in the tax burden with differences in citizens' demand for government services. The second emphasizes the differences in efficiency between cantonal administrations, whereas the third insis…
Redrawing the Class Map: Stratification and Institutions in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland
Have de-industrialization, expanding services and occupational upgrading put an end to class divisions? Drawing on extensive empirical research, this book adds new insights to the debate about the end
Coming to Grips with a Changing Class Structure: An Analysis of Employment Stratification in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland
Over the last 30 years, trends such as service sector growth, welfare state expansion and rising female participation rates have promoted increasing heterogeneity within the occupational system. Accordingly, this article argues that the class map has to be redrawn in order to grasp these changes in the employment structure. For that purpose, it develops the bases of a new class schema that partly shifts its focus from hierarchical divisions to ho…
Weniger Koordination, mehr Markt? Kollektive Arbeitsbeziehungen und Neokorporatismus in der Schweiz seit 1990
Dieser Beitrag diskutiert die These, wonach sich die industriellen Beziehungen in der Schweiz weg vom koordinierten rheinischen hin zum marktorientierten angelsächsischen Modell bewegten. Die Koordination zwischen Arbeitgeberverbänden und Gewerkschaften wird erstens im Bereich der kollektiven Arbeitsbeziehungen sowie zweitens in der Politikgestaltung untersucht. In einem dritten Schritt wird die Entwicklung der Repräsentationsmacht der Verbände s…
The Changing Shape of Class Voting
In the 1990s, sociologists engaged in a heated controversy about class voting. Although empirical evidence accumulated, positions remained surprisingly divided. This paper argues that this disagreement is due to two factors. Firstly, it reflects diverging understandings as to the concept of class voting. Secondly, it is explained by the use of class models that do not satisfactorily represent today's social stratification in Western Europe. In co…
Explaining Workers' Support for Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland
During the 1990s, the working class has become the core clientele of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe. This article empirically examines the motives of workers for supporting a right-wing populist party. Based on data from the European Social Survey for Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland, three different sets of explanations are tested: (1) hypotheses stressing economic determinants, that is, the fear of wage pressure …
The Class Basis of Switzerland's Cleavage between the New Left and the Populist Right
This article argues that a full grown cleavage has surfaced in Swiss politics, separating a libertarian‐universalistic (the New Left) from a traditionalist‐communitarian camp (the Populist Right). Based on survey data of Switzerland's parliamentary election 2007, it examines the cleavage's micro‐foundations and shows that the class constituencies of the New Left (the Social‐Democratic and Green Parties) and the Populist Right (the Swiss People's …
Upgrading or polarization? Occupational change in Britain, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, 1990-2008
Journal Article Upgrading or polarization? Occupational change in Britain, Germany, Spain and Switzerland, 1990-2008 Get access Daniel Oesch, Daniel Oesch * 1University of Lausanne, Switzerland *Correspondence: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jorge Rodríguez Menés Jorge Rodríguez Menés 2University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic …
Gosta Esping-Andersen: The Incomplete Revolution: Adapting to Women's New Roles
In contrast to what the title suggests, this book is not primarily about politics and gender, but about social inequality and the welfare state. At first glance, this volume seems to be little different from Esping-Andersen’s earlier books. Yet it is, and the main novelty concerns the author’s effort to bring in demography in order to understand how inequalities accumulate over the life course. The book starts out with the argument that research …
Occupational Change in Europe: How Technology and Education Transform the Job Structure
'Occupational Change in Europe' examines the pattern of occupational change in Western Europe by drawing on extensive evidence of employment data in Britain, Denmark, Germany, Spain and Switzerland since 1990.
Does Unemployment Hurt Less if There is More of it Around? A Panel Analysis of Life Satisfaction in Germany and Switzerland
This article examines the existence of a habituation effect to unemployment: Does the subjective well-being of unemployed people decline less if unemployment is more widespread? The underlying idea is that unemployment hysteresis may operate through a sociological channel: if many people in the community lose their job and remain unemployed over an extended period, the psychological cost of being unemployed diminishes, and the pressure to accept …
Welfare regimes and change in the employment structure: Britain, Denmark and Germany since 1990
Welfare states are often reduced to their role as providers of social protection and redistribution. In 1990, Esping-Andersen argued that they also affect employment creation and the class structure. We analyse the stratification outcomes for three welfare regimes – Britain, Germany and Denmark – over the 1990s and 2000s. Based on individual-level surveys, we observe a disproportionate increase among professionals and managers, and a decline amon…
Occupational Structure and Labor Market Change in Western Europe since 1990
Observers of social change have been fascinated for a long time by the question of how the employment structure evolves: toward good jobs, bad jobs, or increasing polarization? Three issues are at stake. At the microlevel of single jobs, the concern is with the quality of new employment created. The question raised is to know whether jobs are becoming better paid, more highly skilled, and endowed with greater autonomy. At the macrolevel of social…
The Politics of Advanced Capitalism
This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democraci…
Smooth transition or permanent exit? Evidence on job prospects of displaced industrial workers
This article examines the job prospects of displaced industrial workers in Switzerland. Based on a survey of 1,203 workers who were dismissed after their manufacturing plants closed down, we analyse the determinants of re-employment, the sector of re-employment and the change in wages. Two years after displacement, a majority of workers were back in employment: 69% were re-employed, 17% un-employed and 11% retired. Amongst re-employed workers, tw…
The Feminization of Occupations and Change in Wages: A Panel Analysis of Britain, Germany, and Switzerland
In the past four decades, women have made major inroads into occupations previously dominated by men. This paper examines whether occupational feminization is accompanied by a decline in wages: Do workers suffer a wage penalty if they remain in, or move into, feminizing occupations? We analyze this question over the 1990s and 2000s in Britain, Germany, and Switzerland, using longitudinal panel data to estimate individual fixed effects for men and…
The Working Class Left Behind? The Class Gap in Life Satisfaction in Germany and Switzerland Over the Last Decades
The 1990s and 2000s were a gloomy period for Germany’s working class, hit by mass unemployment, welfare retrenchment and wage stagnation. We examine whether the growing economic disparity between the top and the bottom of Germany’s class structure was accompanied by a widening class gap in life satisfaction. We analyse whether there is a social class gradient in life satisfaction and whether, over the last decades, this class gradient increased i…
The wage penalty for motherhood: Evidence on discrimination from panel data and a survey experiment for Switzerland
Survey-based research finds a sizeable unexplained wage gap between mothers and nonmothers in affluent countries. The source of this wage gap is unclear: It can stem either from the unobserved effects of motherhood on productivity or from employer discrimi
Social Networks and Job Access for the Unemployed: Work Ties for the Upper-Middle Class, Communal Ties for the Working Class
In Europe, almost half of all jobs are found through personal contacts such as colleagues, family, or friends. We analyse whether personal contacts facilitate access to jobs for the middle or the working class. We do not treat informal ties as a homogeneous category, but distinguish work-related contacts from communal contacts such as family, friends, and acquaintances. Our analysis is based on a longitudinal survey of unemployed jobseekers in Sw…
Electoral competition in Europe's new tripolar political space: Class voting for the left, centre‐right and radical right
The rise of the radical right fundamentally changes the face of electoral competition in Western Europe. Bipolar competition is becoming tripolar, as the two dominant party poles of the twentieth century – the left and the centre‐right – are challenged by a third pole of the radical right. Between 2000 and 2015, the radical right has secured more than 12 per cent of the vote in over ten Western European countries. This article shows how electoral…
Is Employment Polarisation Inevitable? Occupational Change in Ireland and Switzerland, 1970-2010
The routinisation thesis expects technology to hollow out the middle of the employment structure, leading to a uniform pattern of polarisation across affluent countries. This article argues that occupational change is also shaped by labour supply - particularly education and immigration - and institutions. Polarisation therefore represents just one scenario of occupational change. Our study of Ireland and Switzerland examines long-term change in …
Discrimination in the hiring of older jobseekers: Combining a survey experiment with a natural experiment in Switzerland
The Polarization Myth: Occupational Upgrading in Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, 1992-2015
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 t…
The Gender Wage Gap Opens Long before Motherhood. Panel Evidence on Early Careers in Switzerland
According to a popular argument in economics, the gender wage gap persists not because of employer discrimination against women, but because of the differential investment of fathers and mothers into paid work and the household. We test this argument by comparing the evolution of wages between men and women before the onset of family formation and gendered household specialization. We use a cohort study of young adults for Switzerland (TREE 2000–…
The effect of unemployment on couples separating in Germany and the UK
Objective This article examines how unemployment affects the separation risk of heterosexual coresiding couples, depending on couples' household income and whether men or women become unemployed. Background Unemployment may decrease the separation risk as a drop in resources makes separation more costly—or it may increase the separation risk if unemployment creates stress and reduces the quality of couple relations. Moreover, unemployment may be …
Economics (23 works) · Political science (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Demographic economics (18 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (15 works) · Labour economics (14 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Economic growth (10 works) · Politics (9 works)