L A Keister
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 20175 |
|---|---|
| NOME | L A Keister |
| PRENOMES | L A |
| SOBRENOME | Keister |
| ASSINATURA | KEISTER L A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3662-8564 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 78 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 874 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 77 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1998 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 17 |
Educational Homogamy and Wealth: Assortative Mating, Spouses' Division of Paid Labor, and Net Worth in China
Objective This study examines how educational assortative mating—particularly educational homogamy—shapes household net worth in urban China. Background Despite private wealth emerging as a critical indicator of financial security and social status in post‐reform China, the family‐level processes that shape wealth accumulation remain underexplored. Methods Using nationally representative data from the 2019 China Household Finance Survey and resid…
Housing Fragility: Wealth Position, Portfolio Composition, and Education Among Homeowners
Homeownership is considered an important indicator of financial stability, but the economic security it provides varies substantially across households. In this paper, I examine housing fragility among U.S. homeowners and ask how vulnerability to housing- and credit-market disruptions is organized across wealth position, portfolio composition, and educational attainment. Drawing on perspectives emphasizing financialization and action under uncert…
Betting on Business: How Family Wealth and Ethnic Capital Shape Choices and Constraints for Chinese Americans’ Entrepreneurial Pathways
Entrepreneurship is a mobility mechanism for the immigrant generation, but second-generation Asian Americans are often assumed to shun business ownership in favor of entering the professional labor market. However, there is reason to believe that entrepreneurship is a common and important mobility pathway for the second generation. We explore this possibility by investigating second-generation Chinese Americans who bet on business. Using fieldwor…
Generation X and the Restructuring of Retirement: Cohort, Institutional Context, and Social Class in U.S. Wealth Inequality
Retirement wealth is a core indicator of financial security, autonomy, and inequality in later life. This paper examines how cohort, institutional context, and social class interact to shape retirement wealth, focusing on Generation X. Gen X occupies a critical but understudied position in the life course between peak earning years and full retirement; they also came of age during a major restructuring of the U.S. economy that shifted financial r…
Net Worth Poverty in Childhood: Duration, Timing, and Educational Outcomes
Net worth poverty (NWP) is the modal form of poverty for American children, but how it is experienced across childhood and its associations with human capital accumulation are unknown. Using data from the 1999‒2021 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on a cohort of children followed from birth to age 20, this study measures NWP exposure and duration across the child's life course and relates NWP exposure and duration to high school gradua…
Rethinking Financial Status: A Comprehensive Case-Based Approach
Financial status—the configuration of a household’s income, assets, and debts—shapes economic security, social position, influence, and opportunities for intergenerational transmission of well-being. Yet prior research typically relies on single, summed indicators of income or wealth, overlooking how distinct income sources, asset types, and debt categories combine to locate households within a multidimensional, nonhierarchical financial space. I…
Top wealth households in China and the United States: Wealth portfolios and determinants of top wealth
Top wealth households are crucial to understanding inequality. This study contrasts the characteristics of top wealth households in China and the United States, highlighting the salient differences between the two countries. A comprehensive review of extant literature was conducted to explain how divergent social and economic contexts in each country have led to the differences in top wealth ownership. The study further presents and empirically e…
Religious Affiliation and Homeownership: Contemporary Patterns of Ownership, Value, and Status
Religious affiliation is closely linked to socioeconomic status (SES), with a large body of research documenting persistent differences in education, income, and wealth across major religious groups. Homeownership—a critical measure of SES—provides financial security, accumulated advantage, and intergenerational mobility but has received little attention in the literature on religion and inequality. This study uses data from the Panel Study of In…
Religion in the one percent: A study of American elites
American elites—those in the top one percent of the income and wealth distributions—have enormous economic, political, and social influence. It was once taken for granted that affluent Americans were Mainline Protestants (MPs). However, shifting religious affiliations and demographic changes mirrored in the country's major religious groups suggest that this assumption may no longer hold. Studying elite religion is challenging because no survey da…
Global Financial Shocks and American Elites: Income and Wealth of the One Percent in the United States, 1989 to 2022
Extreme levels of inequality have drawn increasing attention to those at the top of the income and wealth distributions, and the United States is home to some of the world's most affluent and influential households. A robust literature on economic elites in the United States documented details about their incomes and wealth prior to 2019, but it is unclear how recent economic shocks affected their financial resources and the distribution of incom…
Religion and Sociology of Wealth Accumulation
Most religious groups have well-developed teachings regarding economic morality. In this chapter, we address how religious orthodoxy, or right belief, and orthopraxy, or right action, intersect in the case of economic morality. We propose that the manifestation of this interaction is shaped by social location, including race, socio-economic status, class, gender, sexuality, and organizational affiliation. We present three case studies that illust…
Net worth poverty and child Well-being: Black–White differences
Separate Spheres: The Gender Division of Labor in the Financial Elite
In recent decades, the financial elite have seen their economic resources grow significantly, while the income and wealth of other households have stagnated. The financial elite includes couples who are super-rich (top one percent), rich (the 90th–99th percentile), and upper-middle class (the 80th–89th percentile). Gendered work–family arrangements in top economic groups may contribute to inequality—particularly to wealth accumulation among the e…
Net worth poverty and adult health
The Buffering Effect of State Eviction and Foreclosure Policies for Mental Health during the Covid-19 Pandemic in the United States
The COVID-19 pandemic spurred an economic downturn that may have eroded population mental health, especially for renters and homeowners who experienced financial hardship and were at risk of housing loss. Using household-level data from the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey (n = 805,223; August 2020-August 2021) and state-level data on eviction/foreclosure bans, we estimated linear probability models with two-way fixed effects to (1) examine…
Beliefs About Poverty and Inequality: Du Bois and Ethnic Differences Among Catholics
Poverty is among the most challenging social problems in the United States today, and beliefs about the government's role in reducing inequality and raising living standards for the poor are critical to alleviating poverty and its consequences. Du Bois recognized the complex challenges associated with poverty and was ahead of his time in pointing to ethnicity and religion as fundamental to creating change and alleviating poverty. Du Bois' ideas c…
Inequality: A Contemporary Approach to Race, Class, and Gender
Inequality: A Contemporary Approach to Race, Class, and Gender offers a comprehensive introduction to the topics animating current sociological research focused on inequality. Contemporary, engaging, and research-oriented, it is the ideal text to help undergraduate students master the basic concepts in inequality research and gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which race, class, and gender interact with systems of social stratification. F…
Rural Kids and Wealth
Wealth ownership is a critical component of economic well-being, and wealth in early adulthood provides important clues about the trajectories along which individuals move throughout their lives. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we find an association between growing up rural and adult wealth that varies across the components of wealth. We also find that growing up rural has unique implications fo…
Net Worth Poverty and Child Development
The authors investigate whether net worth poverty (NWP) reduces children's well-being. NWP-having wealth (assets minus debts) less than one fourth of the federal poverty line-is both theoretically and empirically distinct from income poverty (IP) and is the modal form of poverty among children. Data come from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement on children ages 3 to 17 years observed between 2002 and 2019. The …
Reproducibility in the Social Sciences
Concern over social scientists' inability to reproduce empirical research has spawned a vast and rapidly growing literature. The size and growth of this literature make it difficult for newly interested academics to come up to speed. Here, we provide a formal text modeling approach to characterize the entirety of the field, which allows us to summarize the breadth of this literature and identify core themes. We construct and analyze text networks…
Gender in the Elite
Research on elites experienced a resurgence in sociology over a decade ago, but this work was largely gender neutral. Recently, a body of work on elite women and gender dynamics in elite families emerged and is growing rapidly. We propose here that gendered processes are critical for understanding the reproduction of elite privilege and inequality and highlight three subjects that dominate contemporary literature in this area. First, we address w…
Net Worth Poverty in Child Households by Race and Ethnicity, 1989–2019
OBJECTIVE: This study is the first to examine net worth poverty, and its intersection with income poverty, by race and ethnicity among child households in the United States. BACKGROUND: Scholarship on economic scarcity for children has largely concentrated on income deficits and thus leaves open important questions about wealth deficits. METHOD: Data come from the 1989-2019 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances, on households with at least one…
Provider Bias in prescribing opioid analgesics: A study of electronic medical Records at a Hospital Emergency Department
Providers tend to prescribe fewer opioids during constrained diagnostic situations and undertreat pain for patients from high-risk and marginalized demographic groups. Potential harms resulting from previous treatment decisions may accumulate by informing future treatment decisions
Community Effectiveness of Masks and Vaccines
Recent controversies about wearing masks and getting vaccinated to slow the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 highlight the potential for individual rights and decision making to create widespread community-level outcomes. There is little work demonstrating the collective spillover effects of pandemic mitigation efforts. The authors contribute by visualizing the proportion of unvaccinated people who would become infected at different combination…
Do You Need Business Assets to Be Rich
The one percent are extremely powerful in the United States, and business assets are an important component of the wealth of these households. The authors show that business assets are an important component of the wealth portfolios of the one percent. In 1989, approximately 40 percent of households in the one percent had sufficient business assets to be in the one percent on the basis of those assets alone. By 2019, about 50 percent of household…
Wealth Inequality in the United States
Wealth ownership in the United States has long been concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population, yet researchers have paid relatively little attention to the causes and consequences of this inequality. In this essay, we review the literature that does exist on wealth accumulation and distribution. We begin with an examination of the reasons that wealth inequality has received little empirical attention. We then discuss methods…
The One Percent
Recent protest movements brought attention to the one percent, a segment of the population that is critical to understanding inequality and social mobility but that attracts relatively little research attention. In this article, I survey current research on the one percent in the United States. I distinguish income from wealth and show that both are very concentrated but that the concentration of wealth, particularly financial wealth, is extremel…
Religion and Wealth: The Role of Religious Affiliation and Participation in Early Adult Asset Accumulation
Researchers have documented extreme inequalities in wealth ownership, but the processes that create these inequalities are not well understood. One important contributing factor that attracts little attention is religion. This study explores the relationship between religious participation, religious affiliation, and patterns of wealth accumulation. I argue that religion affects wealth ownership indirectly by shaping demographic behaviors. I also…
Conservative Protestants and Wealth: How Religion Perpetuates Asset Poverty
The association between cultural orientation and material outcomes is fundamental to sociology research. This article contributes to the understanding of this relationship by exploring how religious affiliation affects wealth ownership for conservative Protestants (CPs). The results demonstrate that religion affects wealth indirectly through educational attainment, fertility, and female labor force participation. The results also provide evidence…
Race and Wealth Inequality: The Impact of Racial Differences in Asset Ownership on the Distribution of Household Wealth
The Wealth of Single Women: Marital Status and Parenthood in the Asset Accumulation of Young Baby Boomers in the United States
In the United States, household wealth is unequally distributed. While facts about the distribution are readily available, less is known about the family dynamics that underlie this important component of inequality. An increasing number of households are headed by single females (both never married and divorced), and the number of single mothers among these households has grown in recent decades. This article explores differences in wealth in th…
Women in the One Percent: Gender Dynamics in Top Income Positions
A growing body of research documents the importance of studying households in the top one percent of U.S. income distribution because they control enormous resources. However, little is known about whose income-men's or women's-is primarily responsible for pushing households into the one percent and whether women have individual pathways to earning one percent status based on their income. Using the 1995 to 2016 Surveys of Consumer Finances, we a…
Race, Family Structure, and Wealth: The Effect of Childhood Family on Adult Asset Ownership
Racial differences in wealth ownership are among the most extreme and persistent forms of stratification in the United States, but the factors that contribute to this inequality are unclear. One potentially important contributing factor is family background. It is a critical determinant of attainment, and both childhood family resources and family structure vary racially. This article reports that family size during childhood contributes signific…
Exchange Structures in Transition: Lending and Trade Relations in Chinese Business Groups
The networks of interfirm relations that developed in business groups during economic transition are central to China's reform and are becoming an important part of the country's emergent economic structure. Using a recent and original data set that includes direct observations of economic choices made by firms, the process by which these interfirm lending and trade ties emerged and evolved in the early stages of reform is explored. Initially, in…
Upward Wealth Mobility: Exploring the Roman Catholic Advantage
Wealth inequality is among the most extreme forms of stratifi cation in the United States, and upward wealth mobility is not common. Yet mobility is possible, and this paper takes advantage of trends among a unique group to explore the processes that generate mobility. I show that non-Hispanic whites raised in Roman Catholic families have been upwardly mobile in the wealth distribution in recent decades, and I fi nd that unique fertility, marriag…
Engineering Growth: Business Group Structure and Firm Performance in China's Transition Economy
Business groups have received increasing attention from academics interested in interorganizational relations and their impact on firms. As part of industrial reform, the Chinese government began in the mid‐1980s to encourage firms to form business groups with structural characteristics that promised to enhance financial performance and productivity. Using 1988‐90 panel data on China's 40 largest business groups and their 535 member firms, the st…
The One Percent: Top Incomes and Wealth in Sociological Research
The one percent, those at the top of the income and wealth distributions, are fundamental to understanding social and economic inequality and mobility, but sociologists rarely focus research attention on this group. This article presents updated evidence showing that both income and wealth are very highly concentrated in the United States but that the concentration of wealth, particularly financial wealth, is extremely high. We focus on the one p…
Gender in the Elite
Research on elites experienced a resurgence in sociology over a decade ago, but this work was largely gender neutral. Recently, a body of work on elite women and gender dynamics in elite families emerged and is growing rapidly. We propose here that gendered processes are critical for understanding the reproduction of elite privilege and inequality and highlight three subjects that dominate contemporary literature in this area. First, we address w…
Beyond Net Worth: Racial Differences in Wealth Portfolios and Black-White Health Inequality across the Life Course
A large body of research links wealth and health, but most previous work focuses on net worth. However, the assets and debts that comprise wealth likely relate to health in different and meaningful ways. Furthermore, racial differences in wealth portfolios may contribute to racial health gaps. Using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and mixed effects growth curve models, we examined the associations between various …
The double one percent: Identifying an elite and a super-elite using the joint distribution of income and net worth
Financial Markets, Money, and Banking
The study of financial markets, money, and banking is largely considered the purview of economics. Yet sociologists have contributed greatly to understanding financial relations since the early history of the discipline. This review begins with an overview of classical sociological approaches to financial markets, money, and banking and then describes how research in these areas exploded in recent decades. I describe the current state of research…
Race and Consumption: Black and White Disparities in Household Spending
Differences in consumption patterns are usually treated as a matter of preferences. In this article, the authors examine consumption from a structural perspective and argue that black households face unique constraints restricting their ability to acquire important goods and services. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys, the authors examine racial differences in total spending and in spending on major categories of goods and services…
The lasting effect of intergenerational wealth transfers: Human capital, family formation, and wealth
Reproducibility in the Social Sciences
Concern over social scientists' inability to reproduce empirical research has spawned a vast and rapidly growing literature. The size and growth of this literature make it difficult for newly interested academics to come up to speed. Here, we provide a formal text modeling approach to characterize the entirety of the field, which allows us to summarize the breadth of this literature and identify core themes. We construct and analyze text networks…
The Effect of Temporary Employment on Asset Accumulation Processes
Temporary employment in the United States has increased considerably in recent decades, but the financial well-being of temporary employees is not well understood. This article examines the effect of both recent and past temporary employment on asset accumulation and portfolio behavior. The authors find that temporary work reduces workers' assets and that this negative effect remains even after a worker has left the temporary position. The author…
Are Baby Boomers Richer Than Their Parents? Intergenerational Patterns of Wealth Ownership in the United States
This study compares wealth ownership and mobility patterns among baby boomers and their parents to explore whether the baby boomers have fared as well during their working years and whether they will be as secure in retirement as their parents. Cohort comparisons using survey data indicate that baby boomers had accumulated more wealth as young adults than their parents had at a similar age. Estimates from a simulation model reveal that baby boome…
The Rational Peasant in China: Flexible Adaptation, Risk Diversification, and Opportunity
A central component of economic development is the reallocation of household labor, typically from subsistence agriculture to nonfarm employment. This occurred in the advanced market economies during the Industrial Revolution, contributing to increases in agrarian and industrial productivity and raising standards of living dramatically. A similar process began in China in the first decade of economic reform and has been central to the development…
Do You Need Business Assets to Be Rich
The one percent are extremely powerful in the United States, and business assets are an important component of the wealth of these households. The authors show that business assets are an important component of the wealth portfolios of the one percent. In 1989, approximately 40 percent of households in the one percent had sufficient business assets to be in the one percent on the basis of those assets alone. By 2019, about 50 percent of household…
Investing in the Homeland: Cross-border investments and immigrant wealth in the U.S
The ties that immigrants maintain across national borders are important indicators of both patterns of global interconnectedness and the incorporation of immigrants in their host countries. Scholars acknowledge that cross-border ties are extensive but debate the persistence of these ties following migration. We propose that simultaneously studying the home and host country financial investments of three large immigrant groups in the United States…
Cohorts and wealth transfers: Generational changes in the receipt of inheritances, trusts, and inter vivos gifts in the United States
Inheritance and Wealth in America
Power Plays: Critical Events in the Institutionalization of the Tennessee Valley Authority
Engineering Growth: Business Group Structure and Firm Performance in China's Transition Economy
Business groups have received increasing attention from academics interested in interorganizational relations and their impact on firms. As part of industrial reform, the Chinese government began in the mid‐1980s to encourage firms to form business groups with structural characteristics that promised to enhance financial performance and productivity. Using 1988‐90 panel data on China's 40 largest business groups and their 535 member firms, the st…
Parental Priorities and Economic Inequality
Arguing that parental actions are important sources of wealth inequality, this book investigates the transmission of economic status from one generation to the next by constructing a model of parental preferences. It offers evidence on the intergenerational transmission of consumption, earnings and wealth. In the model, parents determine the degree of their altruistic concern for their children and spend time and resources on them accordingly, ju…
Commodifying Communism: Business, Trust, and Politics in a Chinese City
Introduction 1. Orientation of the study 2. Institutional commodification: concepts and categories of analysts Part I. Instituted Processes of Commercial Clientelism: 3. The structure of commercial opportunity of Xiamen 4. Symbiotic transactions between private firms and public units 5. Enhancing expectations: the social organization of contracts 6. Entrepreneurial paths and capital: personal attributes as competitive advantage Part II. Economic …
Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women
Wealth in America: Trends in Wealth Inequality
Wealth ownership in the United States has always concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population. Because of scarce data on wealth ownership, the nature of wealth ownership distribution and knowledge about wealth inequality has received little attention from social scientists. Keister synthesizes theory and data from various sources to present a picture of househould wealth distribution from 1962 to 1995. Utilizing existing survey…
Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China
Firm Practices in China's Transforming Economy: Efficiency or Mimicry? 3 2. Path Dependence in China's Economic Transition 24 3. Formal Rational Bureaucracies in Chinese Firms: Causes and Implications 42 4. Changing Labor Relations in the Period of Market Reform 75 5. The Politics of Price Setting in China's Transition Economy 101 6. Economic Strategies in the Face of Market Reforms 121 7. Institutional Pressure, Rational Choice, and Contractual …
The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change
Wealth Inequality in the United States
Wealth ownership in the United States has long been concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population, yet researchers have paid relatively little attention to the causes and consequences of this inequality. In this essay, we review the literature that does exist on wealth accumulation and distribution. We begin with an examination of the reasons that wealth inequality has received little empirical attention. We then discuss methods…
Race and Wealth Inequality: The Impact of Racial Differences in Asset Ownership on the Distribution of Household Wealth
Wealth in America: Trends in Wealth Inequality
The Rational Peasant in China: Flexible Adaptation, Risk Diversification, and Opportunity
A central component of economic development is the reallocation of household labor, typically from subsistence agriculture to nonfarm employment. This occurred in the advanced market economies during the Industrial Revolution, contributing to increases in agrarian and industrial productivity and raising standards of living dramatically. A similar process began in China in the first decade of economic reform and has been central to the development…
Exchange Structures in Transition: Lending and Trade Relations in Chinese Business Groups
The networks of interfirm relations that developed in business groups during economic transition are central to China's reform and are becoming an important part of the country's emergent economic structure. Using a recent and original data set that includes direct observations of economic choices made by firms, the process by which these interfirm lending and trade ties emerged and evolved in the early stages of reform is explored. Initially, in…
Are Baby Boomers Richer Than Their Parents? Intergenerational Patterns of Wealth Ownership in the United States
This study compares wealth ownership and mobility patterns among baby boomers and their parents to explore whether the baby boomers have fared as well during their working years and whether they will be as secure in retirement as their parents. Cohort comparisons using survey data indicate that baby boomers had accumulated more wealth as young adults than their parents had at a similar age. Estimates from a simulation model reveal that baby boome…
Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature of Guanxi
Guanxi, translated as 'social connections,' or 'social networks,' is among the most important studied phenomena in China today. Guanxi lies at the heart of China's social order, its economic structure, and its changing institutional landscape. It is considered important in every realm of life, from politics to business, and officialdom to street life. This 2002 volume offers scholarly thinking on the subject by top China sociologists whose work o…
Corporate labor policies and practices during China's transition: An exploration of implications for social stratification
Chinese Business Groups: The Structure and Impact of Interfirm Relations during Economic Development
The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution, and Labor Management
Financial Markets, Money, and Banking
The study of financial markets, money, and banking is largely considered the purview of economics. Yet sociologists have contributed greatly to understanding financial relations since the early history of the discipline. This review begins with an overview of classical sociological approaches to financial markets, money, and banking and then describes how research in these areas exploded in recent decades. I describe the current state of research…
Sharing the Wealth: The Effect of Siblings on Adults' Wealth Ownership
Sharing the wealth: The effect of siblings on adults’ wealth ownership
Inequality in wealth has been well-documented, but its causes remain uncertain. Family processes in childhood are likely to shape adults’ wealth accumulation, but these factors have attracted little attention. I argue that family size matters: children from larger families accumulate less wealth than do those from smaller families. Siblings dilute parents’ finite financial resources and nonmaterial resources, such as time. This diminishment of re…
Religion and Wealth: The Role of Religious Affiliation and Participation in Early Adult Asset Accumulation
Researchers have documented extreme inequalities in wealth ownership, but the processes that create these inequalities are not well understood. One important contributing factor that attracts little attention is religion. This study explores the relationship between religious participation, religious affiliation, and patterns of wealth accumulation. I argue that religion affects wealth ownership indirectly by shaping demographic behaviors. I also…
Financial Resources and Product Market Development: Strategic Choice and Institutional Processes During China's Transition
Race, Family Structure, and Wealth: The Effect of Childhood Family on Adult Asset Ownership
Racial differences in wealth ownership are among the most extreme and persistent forms of stratification in the United States, but the factors that contribute to this inequality are unclear. One potentially important contributing factor is family background. It is a critical determinant of attainment, and both childhood family resources and family structure vary racially. This article reports that family size during childhood contributes signific…
Economics (54 obras) · Inequality (37 obras) · Sociology (35 obras) · Demographic economics (33 obras) · Political science (31 obras) · Finance (21 obras) · Financial Literacy, Pension, Retirement Analysis (21 obras) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (20 obras) · Economic growth (18 obras) · Business (17 obras)