Thomas DiPrete, born in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, in 1950. Ph.D. from Columbia University, New York City. Professor of Sociology at Duke University, Durham.
Fellow (1 September 1996 – 30 June 1997)
In my estimation, my 1996/97 fellowship academic year has been quite productive. I made progress on several projects, and began some new work as well. Generally speaking, I am quite satisfied with my time here at NIAS. It provided me with the facilities I needed and the necessary time to make considerable progress in my research programme. To be specific, I made progress on the following projects during the 1996/97 academic year:
Structural Change and Job-Mobility. This project, which involves a collaboration with Paul de Graaf, Ruud Luijkx, Michael Tåhlin, and Hans-Peter Blossfeld, led to the production of three papers this year, two of which were accepted for publication during the course of the year. “Structural change, labor market turbulence, and labor market outcomes” (co-authored with my graduate student, K. Lynn Nonnemaker), is currently forthcoming in the American Sociological Review. A second paper, “Collectivist vs.individualist mobility regimes? Structural change and job mobility in four countries”, is forthcoming in the American Journal of Sociology. A third paper, “The social welfare labor market, the crisis of the welfare state, and female employment: Has the expansion slowed?” was completed this spring and is currently under review. We continue to work on a fourth paper, “Different paths to industrial restructuring: A comparison of the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden”.
Income Dynamics, the Family, and the Welfare State in the U.S. and Germany. This project analyses the determinants of and the interrelationships among the various income streams which together constitute family income. We are particularly concerned with isolating the relative contribution of family strategies and welfare state policies to the stabilisation of family income trajectories. During this past year I and my collaborator at Indiana University have primarily been engaged in building the necessary data files for the U.S. and Germany. In the late spring we began analyses of these data. This spring, I researched and wrote a paper on the subject, “How Well Does an individual’s occupation measure a family’s income in contemporary America?”. This paper is nearly complete and should be submitted for publication by early August. Finally, this spring we devised a strategy that relies on Bayesian techniques to clean income data of measurement error. This method will form the basis for a paper that we plan to present at the spring 1998 meetings of the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association.
The Rates of Hiring and Termination in Commercial Banking: A Comparison of Germany and the U.S. This project is an analysis of the recent hiring and termination rates for the U.S. and German offices of Citicorp, N.A., which provided grant funds for this purpose. We have completed our analyses and will be filing a report with Citicorp in July. These results will form the basis of a paper to be submitted for publication in the fall of 1997.
Establishment Dynamics and Individual Job Mobility in France and Sweden. This is a collaborative project with Michael Tåhlin and with Eric Maurin and Dominique Goux of INSEE that began in the spring of my NIAS fellowship year. We are analysing the relationship between growth and contraction of establishments (measured in terms of output and employment) and the rates of entry, internal job mobility and exits from the establishment for different classes of workers. During the NIAS year we completed some important theoretical developments, and also completed data collection for Sweden. We are currently engaged in the production of work files for the two countries, so that we can begin analysis this summer.
Union Strength, Market Forces, and CEO Compensation in American Corporations. In collaboration with a colleague at Vanderbilt, I am analysing the impact of the decline in union strength on the compensation of chief executive officers in U.S. corporations for an eighteen year period from 1970 to 1988. We are juxtaposing two explanations. One asserts that the rise in compensation was a response to firm profitability. The second asserts that the rise resulted from weakened norms of pay equity, which had in the past been enforced by strong unions through the collective bargaining process. During the NIAS fellowship year we completed data collection for measures of union strength by industry for the 1970-1988 period. We are currently collecting data on firm profits for this same period of time. We hope to complete this data collection by the early summer and to begin analysing data at that point in time.