T Mouw
Biographic Data
| ID | 14266 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T Mouw |
| GIVEN NAMES | T |
| FAMILY NAME | Mouw |
| SIGNATURE | MOUW T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6657-1565 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 916 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Career types and labor market structure: Intragenerational mobility in the United States
The impact of the Covid‐19 pandemic on network dynamics among Chinese immigrants in the United States
We use longitudinal data on the social networks of Chinese immigrants in the United States from 2018-2020 to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communication frequency and friendship formation. Understanding the pandemic's effect on social networks is important because, while individual social networks are always in flux (Schaefer and Marcum 2017; Sekara, Stopczynski, and Lehmann 2016), they tend to change slowly over time in periods of…
Stepping-Stone" versus "Dead-End" Jobs: Occupational Structure, Work Experience, and Mobility Out of Low-Wage Jobs
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 mat…
Using Social Networks to Sample Migrants and Study the Complexity of Contemporary Immigration: An Evaluation Study
We test the effectiveness of a link-tracing sampling approach—network sampling with memory (NSM)—to recruit samples of rare immigrant populations with an application among Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. NSM uses the population network revealed by data from the survey to improve the efficiency of link-tracing sampling and has been shown to substantially reduce design effects in simulated sampling. Our goals are to…
The impact of two types of Covid-19-related discrimination and contemporaneous stressors on Chinese immigrants in the US South
The global rise of the COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an increase in anti-Asian discrimination with potentially deleterious effects on individuals of Asian descent. In the present study, we examine how two types of COVID-19-related anti-Asian discrimination and other contemporaneous stressors independently contribute to perceptions of stress in a population-representative sample of Chinese immigrants in North Carolina, as well as the m…
A Century of Key Trends and Debates in Social Stratification in Social Forces
Communication flows and the durability of a transnational social field
Fractured Families, Connected Community: Emotional Engagement in a Transnational Social Network
Family separation due to international migration is an emotional hardship endured by millions in both origin and destination countries. In spite of substantial barriers impeding reunification, families often continue to centre their lives emotionally around their loved ones. Yet they also rely on proximate and cross‐border network ties for support. Social networks impact the ways in which families experience separation, but studies about transnat…
Occupations, Organizations, and Intragenerational Career Mobility
Intragenerational mobility-persistent or secular upward or downward changes in individuals' economic positions or occupational standing over their working lives-is intimately related both to intergenerational mobility and inequality as well as to labor market theories and behaviors. Careers are job sequences or patterns of mobility/immobility within and between occupations and organizations, the two major work structures that shape the opportunit…
Why Did People Move During the Great Recession? The Role of Economics in Migration Decisions
Labor migration offers an important mechanism to reallocate workers when there are regional differences in employment conditions. Whereas conventional wisdom suggests migration rates should increase during recessions as workers move out of areas that are hit hardest, initial evidence suggested that overall migration rates declined during the Great Recession, despite large regional differences in unemployment and growth rates. In this paper, we us…
Sampling migrants from their social networks: The demography and social organization of Chinese migrants in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
The streams of Chinese migration to Africa are growing in tandem with rising Chinese investments and trade flows in and to the African continent. In spite of the high profile of this phenomenon in the media, there are few rich and broad descriptions of Chinese communities in Africa. Reasons for this include the rarity of official statistics on foreign-born populations in African censuses, the absence of predefined sampling frames required to draw…
Binational Social Networks and Assimilation: A Test of the Importance of Transnationalism
While the concept of transnationalism has gained widespread popularity among scholars as a way to describe immigrants' long-term maintenance of cross-border ties to their origin communities, critics have argued that the overall proportion of immigrants who engage in transnational behavior is low and that, as a result, transnationalism has little sustained effect on the process of immigrant adaptation and assimilation. In this paper, we argue that…
Dead-End Jobs
Occupational Linguistic Niches and the Wage Growth of Latino Immigrants
Does the concentration of recent Latino immigrants into occupational linguistic niches—occupations with large numbers of other Spanish speakers—restrict their wage growth? On the one hand, it is possible that Latino immigrants who are concentrated in jobs with large numbers of Spanish speakers may have less on-the-job exposure to English, which may isolate them socially and linguistically and limit their subsequent economic mobility. On the other…
Network Sampling with Memory: A Proposal for More Efficient Sampling from Social Networks
Techniques for sampling from networks have grown into an important area of research across several fields. For sociologists, the possibility of sampling from a network is appealing for two reasons: (1) A network sample can yield substantively interesting data about network structures and social interactions, and (2) it is useful in situations in which study populations are difficult or impossible to survey with traditional sampling approaches bec…
Do Changes in Job Mobility Explain the Growth of Wage Inequality among Men in the United States, 1977-2005
To what extent did the increase in wage inequality among men in the United States over the past three decades result from job loss and/or employment instability? We propose a simple method for decomposing the change in wage inequality into components due to upward and downward between-employer mobility and within-employer wage changes using data on men's wages and job mobility from the 1977-2005 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We fin…
Occupations and the Structure of Wage Inequality in the United States, 1980s to 2000s
Occupations are central to the stratification systems of industrial countries, but they have played little role in empirical attempts to explain the well-documented increase in wage inequality that occurred in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. We address this deficiency by assessing occupation-level effects on wage inequality using data from the Current Population Survey for 1983 through 2008. We model the mean and variance of wages for e…
Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis
The spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that the movement of jobs away from central city areas, combined with constraints on geographic mobility imposed by continued residential segregation, limits the employment prospects of inner‐city minorities. The basic story is straightforward: as jobs decentralize to the suburbs or beyond, black workers find it difficult to move to where the jobs are because of racial residential segregation, resulting in a…
Estimating the Causal Effect of Social Capital: A Review of Recent Research
Although there is a large literature on social capital, empirical estimates of the effect of social capital may be biased because of social homophily, the tendency of similar people to become friends with each other. Despite the methodological difficulties, a recent literature has emerged across several different disciplines that tries to estimate the causal effect of social capital. This paper reviews this recent empirical literature on social c…
Residential Segregation and Interracial Friendship in Schools
This article uses social network and spatial data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the effect of racial residential segregation on school friendship segregation in the United States. The use of hierarchical models allows the authors to simultaneously estimate the effects of race, within‐school residential segregation, and school diversity on friendship choice using the Add Health data. The authors …
Social Support Among Latina Immigrant Women: Bridge Persons as Mediators of Cervical Cancer Screening
A Church-Based Sampling Design for Research with Latina Immigrant Women
Social Capital and Finding a Job: Do Contacts Matter
Does social capital affect labor market outcomes? The prevalent use of job contacts to find work suggests that "who you know" is an important means of getting a good job. Network theories of social capital argue that well-connected workers benefit because of the job information and influence they receive through their social ties. Although a number of studies have found a positive relationship between measures of social capital and wages and/or o…
Are Black Workers Missing the Connection? The Effect of Spatial Distance and Employee Referrals on Interfirm Racial Segregation
I use data on the hiring practices and spatial location of firms in four cities to model the process of interfirm racial segregation. When I control for the spatial location of the firm, the use of employee referrals reduced the probability of hiring a black worker by 75% in firms that are less than 10% black. Among all firms, the results suggest that employee referrals are just as important as the geographic location of the firm in generating em…
Racial differences in the effects of job contacts: Conflicting evidence from cross-sectional and longitudinal data
Social Capital and Finding a Job: Do Contacts Matter
Does social capital affect labor market outcomes? The prevalent use of job contacts to find work suggests that "who you know" is an important means of getting a good job. Network theories of social capital argue that well-connected workers benefit because of the job information and influence they receive through their social ties. Although a number of studies have found a positive relationship between measures of social capital and wages and/or o…
Occupations and the Structure of Wage Inequality in the United States, 1980s to 2000s
Occupations are central to the stratification systems of industrial countries, but they have played little role in empirical attempts to explain the well-documented increase in wage inequality that occurred in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. We address this deficiency by assessing occupation-level effects on wage inequality using data from the Current Population Survey for 1983 through 2008. We model the mean and variance of wages for e…
Residential Segregation and Interracial Friendship in Schools
This article uses social network and spatial data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the effect of racial residential segregation on school friendship segregation in the United States. The use of hierarchical models allows the authors to simultaneously estimate the effects of race, within‐school residential segregation, and school diversity on friendship choice using the Add Health data. The authors …
Job Relocation and the Racial Gap in Unemployment in Detroit and Chicago, 1980 to 1990
The spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that residential segregation and job decentralization combine to adversely affect the employment opportunities of minorities. While employment is increasingly located outside of central cities, residential segregation prevents minorities from moving closer to suburban jobs. Although this hypothesis has intuitive appeal, there is little consensus regarding its empirical validity. This study (1) constructs det…
Bilingualism and the Academic Achievement of First- and Second-Generation Asian Americans: Accommodation with Or without Assimilation
Recent scholarship claims that bilingualism has a positive effect on the academic achievement of immigrant children. According to this perspective, growing up speaking two languages is beneficial because it stimulates cognitive development and allows immigrants a means of resisting unwanted assimilation. Immigrant children who are fluent bilinguals can use their native-language ability to maintain beneficial aspects of their ethnic culture while …
Occupations, Organizations, and Intragenerational Career Mobility
Intragenerational mobility-persistent or secular upward or downward changes in individuals' economic positions or occupational standing over their working lives-is intimately related both to intergenerational mobility and inequality as well as to labor market theories and behaviors. Careers are job sequences or patterns of mobility/immobility within and between occupations and organizations, the two major work structures that shape the opportunit…
Culture Wars and Opinion Polarization: The Case of Abortion
Recent observers have pointed to a growing polarization within the U.S. public over politicized moral issues—the so‐called culture wars. DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson studied trends over the past 25 years in American opinion on a number of critical social issues, finding little evidence of increased polarization; abortion is the primary exception. However, their conclusions are suspect because they treat ordinal or nominal scales as interval data. …
Racial differences in the effects of job contacts: Conflicting evidence from cross-sectional and longitudinal data
Binational Social Networks and Assimilation: A Test of the Importance of Transnationalism
While the concept of transnationalism has gained widespread popularity among scholars as a way to describe immigrants' long-term maintenance of cross-border ties to their origin communities, critics have argued that the overall proportion of immigrants who engage in transnational behavior is low and that, as a result, transnationalism has little sustained effect on the process of immigrant adaptation and assimilation. In this paper, we argue that…
Network Sampling with Memory: A Proposal for More Efficient Sampling from Social Networks
Techniques for sampling from networks have grown into an important area of research across several fields. For sociologists, the possibility of sampling from a network is appealing for two reasons: (1) A network sample can yield substantively interesting data about network structures and social interactions, and (2) it is useful in situations in which study populations are difficult or impossible to survey with traditional sampling approaches bec…
Stepping-Stone" versus "Dead-End" Jobs: Occupational Structure, Work Experience, and Mobility Out of Low-Wage Jobs
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 mat…
Fractured Families, Connected Community: Emotional Engagement in a Transnational Social Network
Family separation due to international migration is an emotional hardship endured by millions in both origin and destination countries. In spite of substantial barriers impeding reunification, families often continue to centre their lives emotionally around their loved ones. Yet they also rely on proximate and cross‐border network ties for support. Social networks impact the ways in which families experience separation, but studies about transnat…
Sampling migrants from their social networks: The demography and social organization of Chinese migrants in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
The streams of Chinese migration to Africa are growing in tandem with rising Chinese investments and trade flows in and to the African continent. In spite of the high profile of this phenomenon in the media, there are few rich and broad descriptions of Chinese communities in Africa. Reasons for this include the rarity of official statistics on foreign-born populations in African censuses, the absence of predefined sampling frames required to draw…
Career types and labor market structure: Intragenerational mobility in the United States
The impact of the Covid‐19 pandemic on network dynamics among Chinese immigrants in the United States
We use longitudinal data on the social networks of Chinese immigrants in the United States from 2018-2020 to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communication frequency and friendship formation. Understanding the pandemic's effect on social networks is important because, while individual social networks are always in flux (Schaefer and Marcum 2017; Sekara, Stopczynski, and Lehmann 2016), they tend to change slowly over time in periods of…
Using Social Networks to Sample Migrants and Study the Complexity of Contemporary Immigration: An Evaluation Study
We test the effectiveness of a link-tracing sampling approach—network sampling with memory (NSM)—to recruit samples of rare immigrant populations with an application among Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. NSM uses the population network revealed by data from the survey to improve the efficiency of link-tracing sampling and has been shown to substantially reduce design effects in simulated sampling. Our goals are to…
A Century of Key Trends and Debates in Social Stratification in Social Forces
Why Did People Move During the Great Recession? The Role of Economics in Migration Decisions
Labor migration offers an important mechanism to reallocate workers when there are regional differences in employment conditions. Whereas conventional wisdom suggests migration rates should increase during recessions as workers move out of areas that are hit hardest, initial evidence suggested that overall migration rates declined during the Great Recession, despite large regional differences in unemployment and growth rates. In this paper, we us…
Are Black Workers Missing the Connection? The Effect of Spatial Distance and Employee Referrals on Interfirm Racial Segregation
I use data on the hiring practices and spatial location of firms in four cities to model the process of interfirm racial segregation. When I control for the spatial location of the firm, the use of employee referrals reduced the probability of hiring a black worker by 75% in firms that are less than 10% black. Among all firms, the results suggest that employee referrals are just as important as the geographic location of the firm in generating em…
Bilingualism and the Academic Achievement of First- and Second-Generation Asian Americans: Accommodation with Or without Assimilation
Recent scholarship claims that bilingualism has a positive effect on the academic achievement of immigrant children. According to this perspective, growing up speaking two languages is beneficial because it stimulates cognitive development and allows immigrants a means of resisting unwanted assimilation. Immigrant children who are fluent bilinguals can use their native-language ability to maintain beneficial aspects of their ethnic culture while …
Job Relocation and the Racial Gap in Unemployment in Detroit and Chicago, 1980 to 1990
The spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that residential segregation and job decentralization combine to adversely affect the employment opportunities of minorities. While employment is increasingly located outside of central cities, residential segregation prevents minorities from moving closer to suburban jobs. Although this hypothesis has intuitive appeal, there is little consensus regarding its empirical validity. This study (1) constructs det…
Culture Wars and Opinion Polarization: The Case of Abortion
Recent observers have pointed to a growing polarization within the U.S. public over politicized moral issues—the so‐called culture wars. DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson studied trends over the past 25 years in American opinion on a number of critical social issues, finding little evidence of increased polarization; abortion is the primary exception. However, their conclusions are suspect because they treat ordinal or nominal scales as interval data. …
Are Black Workers Missing the Connection? The Effect of Spatial Distance and Employee Referrals on Interfirm Racial Segregation
I use data on the hiring practices and spatial location of firms in four cities to model the process of interfirm racial segregation. When I control for the spatial location of the firm, the use of employee referrals reduced the probability of hiring a black worker by 75% in firms that are less than 10% black. Among all firms, the results suggest that employee referrals are just as important as the geographic location of the firm in generating em…
Racial differences in the effects of job contacts: Conflicting evidence from cross-sectional and longitudinal data
Social Capital and Finding a Job: Do Contacts Matter
Does social capital affect labor market outcomes? The prevalent use of job contacts to find work suggests that "who you know" is an important means of getting a good job. Network theories of social capital argue that well-connected workers benefit because of the job information and influence they receive through their social ties. Although a number of studies have found a positive relationship between measures of social capital and wages and/or o…
Social Support Among Latina Immigrant Women: Bridge Persons as Mediators of Cervical Cancer Screening
A Church-Based Sampling Design for Research with Latina Immigrant Women
Estimating the Causal Effect of Social Capital: A Review of Recent Research
Although there is a large literature on social capital, empirical estimates of the effect of social capital may be biased because of social homophily, the tendency of similar people to become friends with each other. Despite the methodological difficulties, a recent literature has emerged across several different disciplines that tries to estimate the causal effect of social capital. This paper reviews this recent empirical literature on social c…
Residential Segregation and Interracial Friendship in Schools
This article uses social network and spatial data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the effect of racial residential segregation on school friendship segregation in the United States. The use of hierarchical models allows the authors to simultaneously estimate the effects of race, within‐school residential segregation, and school diversity on friendship choice using the Add Health data. The authors …
Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis
The spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that the movement of jobs away from central city areas, combined with constraints on geographic mobility imposed by continued residential segregation, limits the employment prospects of inner‐city minorities. The basic story is straightforward: as jobs decentralize to the suburbs or beyond, black workers find it difficult to move to where the jobs are because of racial residential segregation, resulting in a…
Do Changes in Job Mobility Explain the Growth of Wage Inequality among Men in the United States, 1977-2005
To what extent did the increase in wage inequality among men in the United States over the past three decades result from job loss and/or employment instability? We propose a simple method for decomposing the change in wage inequality into components due to upward and downward between-employer mobility and within-employer wage changes using data on men's wages and job mobility from the 1977-2005 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We fin…
Occupations and the Structure of Wage Inequality in the United States, 1980s to 2000s
Occupations are central to the stratification systems of industrial countries, but they have played little role in empirical attempts to explain the well-documented increase in wage inequality that occurred in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. We address this deficiency by assessing occupation-level effects on wage inequality using data from the Current Population Survey for 1983 through 2008. We model the mean and variance of wages for e…
Occupational Linguistic Niches and the Wage Growth of Latino Immigrants
Does the concentration of recent Latino immigrants into occupational linguistic niches—occupations with large numbers of other Spanish speakers—restrict their wage growth? On the one hand, it is possible that Latino immigrants who are concentrated in jobs with large numbers of Spanish speakers may have less on-the-job exposure to English, which may isolate them socially and linguistically and limit their subsequent economic mobility. On the other…
Network Sampling with Memory: A Proposal for More Efficient Sampling from Social Networks
Techniques for sampling from networks have grown into an important area of research across several fields. For sociologists, the possibility of sampling from a network is appealing for two reasons: (1) A network sample can yield substantively interesting data about network structures and social interactions, and (2) it is useful in situations in which study populations are difficult or impossible to survey with traditional sampling approaches bec…
Dead-End Jobs
Binational Social Networks and Assimilation: A Test of the Importance of Transnationalism
While the concept of transnationalism has gained widespread popularity among scholars as a way to describe immigrants' long-term maintenance of cross-border ties to their origin communities, critics have argued that the overall proportion of immigrants who engage in transnational behavior is low and that, as a result, transnationalism has little sustained effect on the process of immigrant adaptation and assimilation. In this paper, we argue that…
Sampling migrants from their social networks: The demography and social organization of Chinese migrants in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
The streams of Chinese migration to Africa are growing in tandem with rising Chinese investments and trade flows in and to the African continent. In spite of the high profile of this phenomenon in the media, there are few rich and broad descriptions of Chinese communities in Africa. Reasons for this include the rarity of official statistics on foreign-born populations in African censuses, the absence of predefined sampling frames required to draw…
Why Did People Move During the Great Recession? The Role of Economics in Migration Decisions
Labor migration offers an important mechanism to reallocate workers when there are regional differences in employment conditions. Whereas conventional wisdom suggests migration rates should increase during recessions as workers move out of areas that are hit hardest, initial evidence suggested that overall migration rates declined during the Great Recession, despite large regional differences in unemployment and growth rates. In this paper, we us…
Communication flows and the durability of a transnational social field
Fractured Families, Connected Community: Emotional Engagement in a Transnational Social Network
Family separation due to international migration is an emotional hardship endured by millions in both origin and destination countries. In spite of substantial barriers impeding reunification, families often continue to centre their lives emotionally around their loved ones. Yet they also rely on proximate and cross‐border network ties for support. Social networks impact the ways in which families experience separation, but studies about transnat…
Occupations, Organizations, and Intragenerational Career Mobility
Intragenerational mobility-persistent or secular upward or downward changes in individuals' economic positions or occupational standing over their working lives-is intimately related both to intergenerational mobility and inequality as well as to labor market theories and behaviors. Careers are job sequences or patterns of mobility/immobility within and between occupations and organizations, the two major work structures that shape the opportunit…
Using Social Networks to Sample Migrants and Study the Complexity of Contemporary Immigration: An Evaluation Study
We test the effectiveness of a link-tracing sampling approach—network sampling with memory (NSM)—to recruit samples of rare immigrant populations with an application among Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. NSM uses the population network revealed by data from the survey to improve the efficiency of link-tracing sampling and has been shown to substantially reduce design effects in simulated sampling. Our goals are to…
The impact of two types of Covid-19-related discrimination and contemporaneous stressors on Chinese immigrants in the US South
The global rise of the COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an increase in anti-Asian discrimination with potentially deleterious effects on individuals of Asian descent. In the present study, we examine how two types of COVID-19-related anti-Asian discrimination and other contemporaneous stressors independently contribute to perceptions of stress in a population-representative sample of Chinese immigrants in North Carolina, as well as the m…
A Century of Key Trends and Debates in Social Stratification in Social Forces
Sociology (20 works) · Economics (17 works) · Demographic economics (16 works) · Geography (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Labour economics (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Immigration (9 works) · Social science (8 works) · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies (8 works)