Does Your Class Give More than a Hint of Your Lifetime Earnings

Assessing Indicators for Lifetime Earnings Over the Life Course for Sweden

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2234888
AutoresRoujman Shahbazian (0000-0003-2611-0198, Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden), Erik Bihagen (0000-0001-8800-9867, Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden)
Ano2022
Volume38
Fascículo4
Páginas527-542
Data de publicação2022-07-23
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEuropean Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0266-7215 • E-ISSN: 1468-2672
EditoraOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/esr/jcab064
OpenAlexW4206794605
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas17
Referências citadas34

From a sociological stratification perspective, we would expect occupationally based measures to be valid proxies for lifetime earnings, but recent research suggests that annual earnings outperform occupational measures. In this article, we examine how class, occupation, education, and annual earnings are associated with lifetime earnings across almost complete working lives, at ages of around 20-65 years for Swedish cohorts born in the 1940s. Our results indicate that while annual earnings are considerably more accurate proxies for the lion's share of working life, occupational measures are as expected more stable and somewhat better at the start and end of working lives. Our results also support the idea that micro-classes are better proxies of lifetime earnings than big classes. Contrary to some previous research, occupational measures perform better for women than for men in this respect, and occupational measures are better than education. Our main conclusions are that proxies for lifetime earnings have life-cycle biases that should be considered in, for instance, analyses of intergenerational mobility, and that occupationally based measures are more stable than annual earnings but, overall, are not very valid as indicators of lifetime earnings compared to annual earnings

Demographic economics · Earnings · Economics · Life course approach · Accounting · Health disparities and outcomes · Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics