Does working in a low-wage job lead to increased opportunities for upward mobility, or is it a dead-end that traps workers? In this article, we examine whether low-wage jobs are “stepping stones” that enable workers to move to higher-paid jobs that are linked by institutional mobility ladders and skill transferability. To identify occupational linkages, we create two measures of occupational similarity using data on occupational mobility from matched samples of the Current Population Survey (CPS) and data on multiple dimensions of job skills from the O*NET. We test whether work experience in low-wage occupations increases mobility between linked occupations that results in upward wage mobility. Our analysis uses longitudinal data on low-wage workers from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) and the 1996 to 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). We test the stepping-stone perspective using multinomial conditional logit (MCL) models, which allow us to analyze the joint effects of work experience and occupational linkages on achieving upward wage mobility. We find evidence for stepping-stone mobility in certain areas of the low-wage occupational structure. In these occupations, low-wage workers can acquire skills through work experience that facilitate upward mobility through occupational changes to skill and institutionally linked occupations.

How are changes in the low-wage labor market affecting the mobility of workers out of low-wage work? I investigate changes in the wage mobility of workers starting employment spells in low wages using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1968 to 2014 and discrete-time event history analysis. About half of all low-wage workers move to better wages within four years. Effects on mobility rates are significant by age, gender, race, education, occupation, and job characteristics. Mobility rates out of low-wage work have declined since the late 1990s. Little progress has been made in closing the gaps in mobility for women and nonwhites over time. I find evidence for the decline of firm internal labor markets and lower mobility for part-time workers over time.

This paper addresses several key research issues raised by Spilerman’s (1977) landmark article on careers and intragenerational mobility. We first identify three types of careers: employer-based, occupation-based, and those established in occupational internal labor markets (OILMs). We focus on OILMs, which describe a structure that enables upward job and wage mobility through movement across occupations. We use CPS and O*NET data to create measures of occupational similarity and use them—along with indicators of occupational and organizational mobility/immobility—to identify the three career types in longitudinal data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY). We next derive measures of work experience based on career types and link them to wages. We find that employer, occupation, and OILM experience are all positively related to wages, and that wage returns to OILM experience are greater in occupations with high wage inequality.

It is widely believed that entrepreneurship constitutes an ideal path for achieving both economic mobility. Yet, due to lack of access to the necessary resources for business development and success, a large portion of the American population is unable to use entrepreneurship as a pathway to economic mobility. We use a longitudinal approach to differentiate necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship. Workers in necessity entrepreneurship have low incomes and typically lack related work experience in the job of their business. Workers in opportunity entrepreneurship typically enter entrepreneurship with a familiarity of the business environment from past work experience and with financial capital. We use longitudinal survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamic’s on workers’ careers including entry, exit, and income from self-employment to operationalize necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship and investigate the impact on upward mobility through entrepreneurship. We find that there is a much greater level of necessity entrepreneurship when measured longitudinally using low annual labor income prior to entry than measures solely using unemployment prior to entry. Women and Black entrants to self-employment are much more likely to be in necessity self-employment. We find a high rate of exit from self-employment and this includes workers with opportunity characteristics like more occupational experience and higher labor income prior to entry. The level of financial resources is a primary predictor of upward mobility through self-employment. Necessity entrepreneurship is characterized by longer durations in self-employment at low levels of income.

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Low-wage work is a persistent feature of the U.S. labor market with about a quarter of workers in low-wage jobs. About half of all low-wage workers move to better wages in four years. Vocational training programs are a widely discussed policy intervention for increasing low-wage workers’ economic mobility and consequently supporting low-income families. Germany’s vocational education and training system is highlighted as a model by U.S. policy experts. This article investigates the role of vocational training systems in the U.S. and Germany in facilitating low-wage workers’ mobility to better wages. We use harmonized longitudinal data from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), growth curve models, and event history analysis. We use novel measures of the match between a workers’ training and their job and operationalize cross-occupation job ladders using a measure of the skill similarity between detailed occupations. A key feature of the success of the German system is the role of firm apprenticeships that links training to jobs resulting in a high match between training and a workers’ job. We investigate how often low-wage workers are achieving these matches, the wage returns to matches, and how these matches changed over time in both countries by gender and for race/ethnic groups. Next, we investigate how vocational education aligns with job ladders that facilitate the accumulation of skills and mobility over time and whether some workers are more or less likely to access these job ladders. The findings of this paper contribute to our understanding of the efficacy of vocational education programs for facilitating low-wage workers’ upward mobility.

Although eighty percent of low-wage workers are not in poverty, low-wage work and poverty are often conflated. I distinguish the two and investigate how household conditions affect workers’ mobility out of low-wage work. I argue households are central labor market organizations, parallel to firms, occupations, and unions in explaining labor market inequality. I define households as contested and resourced organizations. I operationalize the contested part of households by investigating how falling into poverty affects low-wage worker’s mobility. I argue that falling into poverty introduces new search frictions as settled patterns of household tasks are re-negotiated. These new search frictions limit mobility consistent with the theory of dynamic monopsony. I operationalize the resourced part of households using 3-year post-tax and transfer income and liquid savings. I analyze data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics using discrete-time event history analysis. My results are consistent with household search frictions explain the lower mobility of households falling to poverty. First, workers with larger income drops when falling into poverty move to better wages at lower rates. Second, sixty percent of the effect of a household being in poverty in the previous year on a low-wage worker’s mobility is explained by a lack of household resources. Households with longer durations in poverty are characterized by a diminishment of household resources.

What is the effect of poverty on low-wage workers’ upward mobility? This study compares the mobility of low-wage workers in poverty to similarly situated low-wage workers not in poverty. I use the nationally-representative and long-running Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate how short and long durations in low-wage work and poverty affect mobility. Using event history analysis, I find a large and substantial negative effect of poverty on low-wage workers’ mobility. For workers in households experiencing poverty spells of five years, the poverty effect is more than five times larger or more than the poverty effect for workers in households in their first year of poverty. Next, I test two prominent hypotheses for the lower mobility of low-wage workers in poverty: workers in poverty have worse skills and/or worse jobs with fewer job ladders. Low-wage workers in poverty are less educated and have more unemployment experience. Human capital variables explain about 20 percent of the baseline effect of poverty on mobility. After accounting for human capital, variables for workers’ job characteristics do not explain any of the remaining effect of poverty on mobility. Researchers need to consider a wider range of alternative explanations for the lower mobility of low-wage workers in poverty.

Persistent poverty is typically defined as a place with a continuously high poverty rate. An alternative approach is to measure persistent poverty at the household level. Households experiencing more than five years in poverty are considered in persistent poverty. Analyzing persistent poverty at the household-level allows for the investigation of variation across places, in particular the difference between places with similar poverty rates, but different amounts of households in short vs long poverty spells. I use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and analyze variation in persistent poverty by community type and region. I find that the highest percentage of households in persistent poverty are in rural communities in the South and North Central regions. In these two regions, poverty rates have remained high since the 1990s. Persistent poverty is comparatively low across community types in the Northeast and West regions but increased in recent decades. Rates of persistent poverty are higher among Black households than white households and this is particularly the case in the rural South.

Progress in reducing the gender pay gap has slowed or even stalled. Three prominent explanations for the gender pay gap are interrelated: occupational sex segregation, the motherhood wage penalty, and the rise of overwork. A challenge for the literature is the lack of a methodological approach that allows researchers to test the relative importance of all three hypotheses in the same analysis. This paper begins to address this methodological challenge by modeling the wage growth and wage returns to occupational changes for men, childless women, and mothers. This second analysis uses a conditional logit. We test for the effects of occupational segregation, compensating differentials, and overwork on explaining differential upward and downward occupational wage moves for childless women and mothers relative to men. Results indicate that most of what we term the job-anchored gender pay gap, or the gender pay in wage growth, is due to the lower wage returns to occupations moves for mothers relative to childless women and men. Mothers are less likely to make occupational moves resulting in large upward wage gains in terms of occupational mean wages due to occupational segregation. Childless women and mothers are both more likely than men to make occupational moves resulting in large downward losses in terms of mean occupational wages. These moves do not look to be explained by compensating differentials and may be due to exit from toxic environments.

Sociologists have developed a wide-range of explanations to explain the persistence of gender inequality in the labor market at the micro, meso, and macro levels. Methodological choices and a focus on rejecting the competing explanations derived from human capital theory have limited testing of competing sociological explanations in the same analysis. I organize these sociological explanations into five hypotheses and test two, the work-life boundary maintenance hypothesis and the institutional hypothesis. I use a dynamic model predicting the mobility of low-wage workers to better wages to incorporate and test explanations at the individual, household, and labor market levels of analysis. I find strong support for the work-life boundary maintenance hypothesis that predicts that women labor market choices, here mobility to better wages, are constrained by gendered household, childcare responsibilities, and poverty. My results show that women in low-wage work with more resources, due to being partnered to a labor market insider, are more likely to move out of low-wage work. I find no support for competing commitment hypothesis of human capital theory that predicts that these same women with more resources are more likely to withdraw from the labor market and be less likely to achieve better wages. The institutional hypothesis, that women’s lower mobility is due to lower access than men to labor market institutions promoting wage growth, like union, occupational labor market, and firm labor markets, is not supported.

Women migrants make up an increasing share of return migration flows across the globe. Yet the migration literature largely ignores their work experiences upon return to their home communities. We build on previous research on gender and migration to investigate how migrants’ pathways for economic mobility are gendered. We study the economic mobility of return migrants in Mexico after sojourns in the United States. We examine how gendered work experiences in the U.S. result in the gendered acquisition of human capital and financial resources. Then, we describe how the gendered acquisition of resources interacts with gendered community and household contexts upon return in Mexico to pattern migrants’ economic mobility upon return. Our analysis draws on in-person interviews conducted with 100 women and 236 men who returned from the United States to Mexico. We find that the labor market reintegration for return migrants is an uneven social process. Women migrants fare worse upon return because of more limited opportunities to acquire economic resources in the U.S. Furthermore, even women acquiring high capital in the U.S. experience constraints on their mobility from community and household contexts.

Mass incarceration is a major social program of the past 50 years in the U.S. with broad impacts for race and class inequalities for incarcerated individuals, their children, families, and communities. The cohorts of men coming of age at the beginning of mass incarceration are now approaching retirement age. We investigate the long-term shadow of incarceration in early adulthood across the life course and into later life. Drawing on longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we examine the extent to which incarceration impacts Social Security earnings and racial inequality among individuals of retirement age. We then investigate prominent explanations for this inequality including labor market experience and criminal legal system contact across life course. Our final analysis seeks to estimate the cost of mass incarceration in terms of lost Social Security earnings. We find that mass incarceration has a long afterlife. The cohorts who experienced the height of mass incarceration will reach retirement age in the next two decades with large consequences for inequality in later life.