[Brownbag] Next Monday's Colloquium: Deirdre Bloome, Racial Inequality in Family Income: A Demographic Approach, Monday, Nov 18, 2-3:30pm in 402 Barrows (fwd)

[Liz Ozselcuk]

something of interest to all local demographers, Sociology's Monday 
colloquium:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 09:01:52 -0800
From: John O'Donnell <od at berkeley.edu>
To: undisclosed-recipients:  ;
Subject: Next Monday's Colloquium: Deirdre Bloome,
     Racial Inequality in Family Income: A Demographic Approach, Monday, Nov 18,
     2-3:30pm in 402 Barrows

Inline image 1
For those who don't accept images in their email:

Racial Inequality in Family Income: A Demographic Approach

Racial disparity in family income has remained remarkably stable over the past
40 years in the United States despite major legal and social reforms. In 1968,
at the height of the Civil Rights struggle, African Americans’ median family
income was 60% as large as whites’ median family income. In 2008, it was still
less than two-thirds as large. I examine whether recent trends in family income
inequality between African Americans and whites are better characterized by the
endurance of existing forms of disadvantage (via intergenerational persistence)
or shifting forms of disadvantage (due to contemporary reorganizations of the
family and labor market). I use population projection and decomposition methods
to study these trends, drawing on data from the Current Population Survey, Panel
Study of Income Dynamics, Census and National Vital Statistics. I find that
racial inequality trends are better characterized by contemporary reorganization
than by intergenerational persistence. Inequality persists partly because
low-income African-American children are likely to remain low-income as adults.
However, inequality is also maintained by discontinuity across generations, as
African Americans are particularly likely to be downwardly mobile out of the
middle class. As the share of single-parent families rose, African Americans
increasingly fell into low-income demographic groups. Progress in how much
workers earn was partially offset by changes in how they pool their earnings in
families. Racially-disparate trends in marriage reorganized the form of racial
inequality and family incomes did not fully reflect labor-market gains. Economic
trends were equalizing while demographic trends were disequalizing, generating
on net very slow progress toward racial equality.

Deirdre Bloome is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard
University and a graduate student fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study. Her research interests include economic and racial stratification, social
mobility, family demography, social policy, and statistical methodology. Her
dissertation explores the relationships between inequality and mobility in the
United States using a demographic approach. She holds an AM in statistics from
Harvard University and a certificate in demography from Princeton University's
Office of Population Research. Her research has been supported by organizations
including the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, the Russell Sage Foundation,
the National Science Foundation, and the Institute for Quantitative Social
Science.

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