Fabrizio Bernardi

• PhD
• Professor at National University of Distance Education

Compensatory advantage is a mechanism of social stratification that complements cumulative advantage and path dependence. In this article, I first discuss the theoretical foundations of the compensatory advantage and path dependence mechanisms and the methodological challenges that complicate identification of their effects. Next, I present a pract...

In this article, we analyse the ritual of null hypothesis significance testing among the European sociologists. The focus is on the distinction between statistical significance and substantive, sociological significance. We review all articles published in the European Sociological Review between 2000– 2004 and 2010–2014 that use regression models...

In Spain the absolute number of employed persons has increased from about 12,300,000 persons in 1994 to 19,300,000 at the end of 2005. In the same period, the number of immigrants has increased from about 500,000 to more than 4 million. The aim of this paper is to analyse the implications of these changes for social inequality. In particular, we in...

This study examines the role of genes and environments in predicting educational outcomes. We test the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis, suggesting that enriched environments enable genetic potential to unfold, and the compensatory advantage hypothesis, proposing that low genetic endowments have less impact on education for children from high socioeconomic st...

Este capítulo aborda un tema clásico en la estratificación social: las desigualdades en las oportunidades de movilidad social. Tras mostrar los conceptos clave y las teorías más relevantes, detalla las tendencias y los factores institucionales que afectan a la movilidad social en España y en Europa.

This study examines the role of genes and environments in predicting educational outcomes. We test the Scarr-Rowe hypothesis, suggesting that enriched environments enable genetic potential to unfold, and the compensatory advantage hypothesis, proposing that low genetic endowments have less impact on education for children from high socio-economic s...

We examine the joint consequences of the COVID‐19 pandemic for fertility and birth outcomes by drawing on full population administrative data from Spain. We find a surprising improvement in birth outcomes in November and to a less extent in December 2020 (eight to nine months after the first wave of the pandemic) compared with monthly trends in the...

Demographic change almost never happens fast, except during wars, natural disasters, and pandemics. We ask what the joint consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for fertility and birth outcomes are by drawing on full population administrative data from Spain. We find a surprising improvement in birth outcomes in November and to a less extent in Dece...

Background: Children who experience parental divorce have worse long-term educational attainment than children living in intact families. Less clear is the extent to which heterogeneity in the divorce penalty depends on parents' socioeconomic background and contextual characteristics. Objective: This study focuses on the negative consequences of pa...

Across EU countries, all available evidence suggests that the number of deaths linked to COVID-19 among those living in nursing homes has been extremely high. However, it is largely unknown to what extent income and education affect the probability of being a nursing home resident. If the probability of residing in a nursing home is stratified by s...

En este capítulo estudiamos desigualdades socioeconómicas en salud analizando el grado de estratificación social de cinco factores de riesgo asociados a la mortalidad por la COVID-19 con diversas bases de datos: (1) infección; (2) teletrabajo; (3) enfermedades crónicas previas; (4) hospitalización entre los infectados; y (5) vivir en residencias de...

Previous studies have shown that the reproduction of social background inequality starts at birth and even in the womb. We advance the understanding of the inequality in early life outcomes by analysing whether prenatal stress affects prematurity and low birth weight and how this effect varies by parental socio-economic status (SES). To address the...

Previous research has shown that seemingly irrelevant events such as unexpected outcomes in sporting events can affect mood and have relevant consequences for episodes of crime and violence, investing behavior and political preferences. In this article, we test whether mood shocks associated with unexpected results in soccer matches in Spain affect...

This work studies the cross-country variability in the interaction effect between academic achievement and social origin on the configuration of the expectation of enrolment in the academic track of upper secondary education. Drawing on the Relative Risk Aversion Theory and the Compensatory Advantage model, we anticipate that academic achievement a...

El efecto directo del origen social (DESO) entre individuos con el mismo nivel educativo ha recibido poca atención en los estudios de movilidad social inter-generacional. En los últimos años, se ha observado un renovado interés en el estudio del DESO como un importante canal (v.g., recursos económicos, sociales y culturales) para la transmisión int...

Recent studies document a social-origins gap or direct effect of social origin (DESO) on labour market outcomes over and above respondents’ education, challenging the idea that post-industrial societies are education-based meritocracies. Yet, the literature offers insufficient explanations on DESO heterogeneity across education and different labour...

BACKGROUND All available evidence suggests that the number of deaths linked to COVID-19 among those living in nursing homes is extremely high. Yet, it remains unknown to what extent there are socio-economic differences among nursing home residents, which can lead, in turn, to social inequality in mortality linked to COVID.OBJECTIVE We investigate w...

The prevalence of non-standard family structures has increased over time and in particular among socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Because children’s attainments are negatively associated with growing up in non-standard family structures, changes in family structures are often considered to have strengthened the reproduction of social inequ...

Previous studies have shown that the reproduction of social background inequality start at births and even in the womb. We advance the understanding of the inequality in early life outcomes by analyzing whether prenatal stress affects prematurity and low birth weight and how this effect varies by parental socio-economic status. To address the endog...

This chapter studies long-term trends in intergenerational class mobility in Spain across the 20th century drawing from a large pooled dataset (n=81,475). From the 1960s, Spain underwent a late but intense economic, cultural and political modernization process. During this period of far-reaching institutional change, men and women experienced a sig...

While the association between parental separation and children’s lower educational achievements is a robust finding, the evidence regarding its heterogeneity across social groups is mixed. Some studies show that socioeconomically advantaged families manage to shelter their pupils from the consequences of parental break-up, while others find the opp...

Research is divided as to whether children living in same-sex parent familiesachieve different outcomes compared with their peers. In this article, weimprove on earlier estimates of such differences and subsequently study wheth-er and why the association between parental union sex composition and chil-dren’s school progress changed over time. Data...

We study the evolution of intergenerational inequality of college attainment in the United States over the 20th century. For this purpose, we expand the Breen-Goldthorpe model of educational investment behaviour and show formally that a rise in the costs of college education and in economic resources by social origins lead to an increase in inequal...

Objective: The aim of this article is to document how childhood family structure is related to the accumulation of wealth. Background: Childhood family structure is a commonly studied determinant of child and adult outcomes, but little is known about its effects on wealth accumulation. Wealth is affected by a wide variety of factors, including hum...

In this article, first, we present new evidence on a specific type of compensatory advantage (CA) mechanism in educational transitions and attainment, whereby students from socio-economically advantaged families compensate the negative event of achieving poor grades by ignoring them and disproportionally moving on to the next level of education. Us...

In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in how the effects of parental separation on children’s educational attainment vary with social background. On the one hand, parents with more resources might be better able to prevent possible adverse events like separation to affect their children’s outcomes. On the other hand, chil...

Previous research has documented that children who do not live with both biological parents fare somewhat worse on a variety of outcomes than those who do. In this article, which is the introduction to the Special Issue on “Family dynamics and children’s well-being and life chances in Europe,” we refine this picture by identifying variation in this...

We examine whether the presence of non-intact families in society is related to increased inequality in educational attainment according to social background, as suggested by the ‘diverging destinies’ thesis. We analyze four countries, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that differ in the prevalence of non-intact families an...

This work studies how the inequality of educational opportunities (IEO) is shaped by two institutional features of the educational system: its expansion, that is the extent to which individuals participate in it, and its design, or the way the process of schooling is organised. The empirical analysis is driven by a micro-level theoretical model, ba...

We use the British Cohort Study 1970 to show that the proportion of children achieving a tertiary education degree is 8 percentage points lower for the offspring of separated parents than for children from intact families. Moreover, the children of highly educated parents experience a two times larger ‘separation penalty’ than the children of less...

Introduction The last generation of research on social stratification has given great importance to international comparison, studying how different contexts are related to the stratification of individual outcomes (Treiman and Ganzeboom, 2000). This chapter focuses on educational achievement, and in particular on differentials in achievement based...

Many studies have documented a negative association between macroeconomic indicators and fertility in times of economic crisis. These studies are based on research designs that do not allow for excluding that the observed association is driven by confounders. The aim of the present paper is to estimate the causal effect of the Great Recession on co...

Previous research has shown that being born in the months immediately preceding the school entry cutoff date leads to lower educational outcomes in countries with a strict admission policy. In this article we use the effect of age at school entry in England as an identification device to provide a causal estimate of the compensatory advantage enjoy...

The aim of the paper is to investigate the consequences of higher educational expansion on two goals of the educational system, that of promoting equity of educational opportunities and that of providing credentials that facilitate the matching between labour supply and demand. The first goal is typically studied by research on inequality of educat...

Background: In this paper we study the long-term consequences of parental divorce in a comparative perspective. Special attention is paid to the heterogeneity of the consequences of divorce for children’s educational attainment by parental education. Objective: The study attempts to establish whether the parental breakup penalty for tertiary educa...

In this article, we analyse whether previous school results have a social background-specific impact on a student’s decision to continue in schooling. We refer to the model proposed by Breen and Goldthorpe (1997) and scrutinize the theoretical underpinnings of the interaction between previous school performance and educational choices. We provide t...

This paper explores the impact of school performance (primary effects) and the structure of costs and bene ts that individuals of different social class face (secondary effects) on the transition from compulsory to non-compulsory education in Spain. We nd that both predictors of educational paths seem to operate through an interactive effect, which...

En este artículo exploramos el impacto del rendimiento escolar (conocido como efectos primarios) y la estructura de costes y beneficios a los que se enfrentan los individuos de distinta clase social de origen (efectos secundarios) cuando afrontan la transición entre la educación obligatoria y no obligatoria en España. Ambos predictores de las traye...

In almost every country individuals in the upper class enjoy, on average, higher subjective wellbeing (SWB) than individuals in the lower class. However, the size of the SWB gap – that is, the difference between the upper and the lower class – varies significantly across countries. This paper attempts to explain why this is the case by using the th...

p>Los objetivos del articulo son 1) analizar las consecuencias de la flexibilidad laboral en el curso vital de los individuos, 2) asi como saber si la flexibilidad ha socavado o reforzado la importancia de las clases sociales, de la educacion y del genero en distintos aspectos concernientes al curso vital, sobre todo relacionados con el empleo en E...

The aim of this article is to analyse the determinants of marriage dissolution in Spain and their variation over time for women married between 1949 and 2006. Data are drawn from the Survey of Fertility, Family and Values of 2006. The article analyses the transition from first marriage to marital dissolution for couples who married in two eras: one...

This article provides an analysis of employment and occupational attainment of recent immigrants to Spain. We use data from the Spanish labour force surveys for the years between 2002 and 2007 and compare the probability of being active versus inactive and that of being employed versus unemployed among immigrants and native-born Spaniards, using lo...

Juan-Ignacio Martínez-Pastor © 2011 Fabrizio Bernardi & Juan-Ignacio Martínez-Pastor. This open-access work is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 2.0 Germany, which permits use, reproduction & distribution in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author(s) and source are given...

Job flexibility is a polysemic concept. Blossfeld et al. (2005a) have listed some of its meanings. Flexibility can be: (a) numerical flexibility, using fixed-term contracts or layoffs; (b) functional flexibility when employees multitask and adjust their jobs to the company’s changing needs; (c) salary flexibility when salaries are adjusted; (d) tim...

Various papers have shown that in countries and cohorts where the rate of divorce is low, women with higher education are more likely to get divorced. However, when divorce becomes more common, the relationship between female education and marriage dissolution changes from being positive to being negative. The first aim of this article is to invest...

This article analyses the risk of occupying an unskilled job for young people in Spain over the last 30 years. In order to study change over time, all of the quarters of the Spanish Labor Force Survey have been used, from the third quarter of 1976 to the third quarter of 2007. The results show that the likelihood of having an unskilled job has decr...

This paper seeks to identify mechanisms that may underpin part of the observed association between class of origin and educational attainment in the Spanish case. In line with a well established strategy in the field of social stratification sociology, we analyze educational attainment as the outcome of a sequence of transitions at each of which a...

The paper analyses inequalities in educational outcomes (IEO) by class of family of origin in Italy and Spain for five 10-year cohorts born from 1920 to 1969, using the cumulative logit (ordinal regression) model. In both countries the question is whether, as education expanded, the class IEO's remained stable or diminished. The dominant view in th...

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on the alleged "death" of social class in two ways. First, it critically examines the theoretical arguments that link the globalisation process to changes in patterns of social inequality and class decomposition in advanced Oecd countries. Second, it provides an empirical assessment of the claim of the de...

Profound social and economic transformations have taken place over the last two decades in modern societies. These changes are often referred to as globalization. The aim of this article is to examine whether processes of globalization have produced increasing convergence of employment-related aspects of national-level welfare regimes, industrial r...

The aim of this paper is to integrate some of the contributions of studies on social mobility and family dynamics in order to explain the transition to residential independence in Spain. The explanatory model focuses, on the one hand, on Easterlin's work on the conflicts between aspirations and resources and, on the other hand, on some key assumpti...

The aim of this paper is to integrate some of the contributions of studies on social mobility and family dynamics in order to explain the transition to residential independence in Spain. The explanatory model focuses, on the one hand, on Easterlin’s work on the conflicts between aspirations and resources and, on the other hand, on some key assumpti...

The aim of this article is to analyse the effect of social mobility on fertility behaviour. I discuss, thus, a theoretical model that combines Easterlin’s theory on the relationship between resources and aspirations, with a key assumption of the interpretations of the persistence of inequality in educational and social mobility opportunities put fo...

Globalization, argue the contributors to this book, has remarkably accelerated social and economic change in modern societies. One such change is manifested in the world of work and careers. This book explores whether the forces of globalization affect the erosion of standard career patterns of mid-career men in twelve OECD countries. Overwhelming...

ABSTRACT The objectives of the research are: 1) to determine whether young people’s job opportunities at the beginning ,of their careers have improved ,or worsened ,in Spain between 1976 and 2005, 2) to find out what individual characteristics

In recent years the decline in fertility and the difficulties faced by individuals in having the desired number of children have gained growing attention in the academic and public debate. The aim of the present paper is twofold. The first is to scrutinize the rationale and the justification of public support for individual fertility choices. This...

This paper studies the transition from school to work in Italy, the Netherlands and the US from a dynamic perspective. Its aim is to investigate to what extent observed variations in returns to education reflect institutional differences in the three countries. Hypotheses are developed about how the characteristics of the educational system and the...

This paper studies whether a better educational performance enhances the chances of success at entry into the Italian labour market. Two indicators of educational performance are considered: the final grades in the diploma achieved and the speed with which a given educational qualification was completed. It is argued that the Italian educational sy...

In Spain, since late 70s the total fertility rate has declined to the currently value of about 1.2 children per woman, which is one of the lowest in the world. It is also well known that Spaniards have fewer children than they would wish: the average desired number of children is about 2.2. Thus, the child gap, i.e. the average differ- ence between...

The issue of occupational and educational homogamy has recently enjoyed a renewal of interest in the field of social stratification research (Mare 1991; Smeenk 1998; Smiths et al. 1998). During the 70s and 80s the study of the partner’s similarity with regard to education and occupation has been mainly a sub-field within the research on intergenera...

In this paper we present the results of a study regarding the relationships between homeownership and social class in Italy. Using data from the 1998 Survey on Household Income and Wealth, we have performed an event history analysis on the chances and ways of home-ownership attainment. At the theoretical level we look into the debates concerning th...

Among the applications of event history analysis, in the last 10 years the lion's share has been played by proportional transition rate model. This type of models suffers from a major draw-back: it does not allow us to distinguish whether a covariate affects the event timing (the event occurs sooner/later) or the overall probability of the ultimate...

In this paper I analyse how a wife's participation and outcomes in the labour market (LM) are influenced by her husband's parallel career. According to New Home Economics, both husband and wife join in making decisions about their participation and effort in paid work, evaluating the comparative advantage they have in paid and unpaid domestic work....

According to the recent discussion on the relationship between sociology and economics, labour market is an interesting and peculiar field: trespassing from one discipline to the other has been more frequent then in other fields. In this review we adress two questions: a) why is labour market a peculiar area, with many exchanges between sociologist...