Social structure and intergenerational transmission of status: a hierarchical analysis

Abstract

Empirical studies of stratification systems have concentrated in investigating the mechanisms of transmission of status. Organizational differences found between economic sectors and regional differences fall precisely in the structural dimension of stratification studies. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to investigate to what extent the current occupational status of individuals was affected by their social origin, considering the time when and where these individuals entered the labor market. We used the databases from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD in Portuguese) of 1973, 1982, 1988 and 1996, and estimated the Hierarchical Models that represent, for studies of intergenerational transmission of status, the possibility of better control of structural factors. We observed that the segmentation of the labor market in different economic sectors and the level of economic growth in Brazil in different cohorts of individuals entering the labor market are mechanisms that function as mediators for the transmission status while regional segmentation had no significant effect.