Alessandro Ferrara

A large literature documents a negative effect of family dissolution on children’s educational attainment, yet little is known about how this “divorce penalty” varies by migration background. Theory suggests that children of immigrants have “less to lose” from parental separation due to their lower initial socioeconomic resources, although evidence is limited to a few country cases. Moreover, research has largely overlooked the children of mixed couples (consisting of one native and one immigrant parent); however, as we argue, they may be most affected by parental separation due to disrupted ties with their immigrant parent and minority networks. The consequences for their educational attainment may be especially pronounced if the immigrant parent has greater socioeconomic resources. Using data from 12 European countries in the Generations and Gender Survey, we examine variation in the divorce penalty in tertiary attainment by parental migration background and its moderation by parental education. Contrary to previous research, we find no differences in divorce penalties between children with two native and two immigrant parents. The largest penalty occurs among children of mixed couples, particularly those with an immigrant father. This penalty is amplified when the immigrant parent has a tertiary education, suggesting that children lose access to valuable parental resources. Analyses of residential and meeting patterns after separation reveal that for immigrant fathers, this may be due to a greater likelihood of losing contact with their children. Overall, the study sheds light on how family instability, migration background, and social origins jointly shape children’s long-term educational outcomes.

1. Vaccination remains one of the most effective and cost-efficient public health measures, dramatically reducing the burden of infectious diseases worldwide. Yet in recent years, several European ...

The health of migrants is mostly studied in relation to destination-country natives, Origin-country comparisons are rarely pursued, even though they provide a more convincing counterfactual, allowing us to (a) measure “health gains” from migration, (b) disentangle mechanisms including selectivity, cultural factors and contextual change, (c) elucidate the relationship between migration and global health inequality. We address this gap by comparing the health at birth of children born in Spain to migrant parents from 15 origin countries with that of children born in those same origin countries, using Spanish vital statistics linked to Demographic and Health Surveys and other origin-country sources. We find that, for most groups, the children of migrants are healthier at birth (measured via low birth weight) than children in their parents' origin countries. This is also true among groups disadvantaged relative to Spanish natives, and is more pronounced for non-Western and, especially, Asian-origin groups. We find limited support for cultural explanations and stronger support for both migrant selectivity and improved contextual conditions at destination. Though the latter two are not fully separable, our evidence favors the effect of the change in contextual conditions. These results suggest migration can function as an equalizing force, narrowing birthplace-based health inequalities.

Research shows that social media use is associated with poorer adolescent mental health, with stronger adverse consequences for girls. Little is known about whether the effect of social media varies depending on adolescents’ genetic propensity for poor mental health. On the one hand, social media use could trigger genetic propensities for mental health issues (“diathesis-stress model”); on the other hand, it could act as a pervasive adverse environment that can reduce the relative contribution of genetic differences by increasing risk broadly across individuals (“social push model”). This study examines whether the association between social media use and adolescent mental health outcomes – depressive symptoms, low self-esteem, and body dissatisfaction – varies by gender and genetic propensity for depression. Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), we employ a trio design to account for confounding by parents’ genotypes. Results indicate that genetic propensities for depression and greater social media use are associated with poorer adolescent mental health. The influence of social media use is significantly stronger for girls. The genotype-social media use interaction is also highly gendered: the detrimental influence of social media is strongest among girls with low genetic propensities for depression. A moderate use of social media is enough to worsen mental health and compress any genetic predispositions, suggesting that social media use acts as a strong environmental influence consistent with a social push model.

Abortion remains a uniquely contentious issue, rooted not only in moral concerns but also in its broader implications for women’s reproductive autonomy and population dynamics. These tensions become particularly pronounced in migration contexts, where they intersect with debates on integration, cultural identity, and perceived demographic threats to the majority population. We investigate how abortion attitudes among immigrants and their descendants evolve over time spent at destination and across generations, whether this varies when individuals move from less to more liberal settings or vice-versa, and how it is moderated by religion and religiosity. We adopt a multi-sited approach, fitting cross-nested multi-level models on a sample of individuals in thirty-one European countries and originating from ninety-three countries. We find clear patterns of intra- and intergenerational convergence with destination-country views and divergence from origin-country ones, even for migrants moving to more conservative settings. Highly religious individuals across all major faiths are less likely to be aligned with prevailing attitudes in both origin and destination countries, suggesting their views may be shaped by transnational religious frameworks. These findings challenge assumptions that abortion attitudes are either stable or follow a unidirectional liberalizing trajectory, and that patterns of “blocked acculturation” are more prominent among Muslim immigrants.

Theories of immigrant selection posit that immigrants’ pre-migration social standing may explain their children’s educational outcomes. However, this has only been tested in Nordic and Western European countries, where the children of immigrants perform especially well in education. Moreover, few studies investigate the impact of selection on different educational outcomes. Using the 2015 Italian survey ‘Integration of the Second Generation’, we investigate whether (a) immigrant parents are more educated than similar individuals in their countries of origin (positively selected); (b) selection is associated with children’s school grades, attitudes, and aspirations; (c) selection explains educational differences across immigrant groups. We find wide variation in educational selectivity between origin groups. In line with prior evidence, educational selectivity is associated with higher educational aspirations but not school grades, which may lock the second-generation into an “aspiration squeeze”, with ambitious goals but lower means to attain them.

Background Academic resilience, defined as the capacity of socio-economically disadvantaged students to achieve at high academic levels, has become a key indicator in international education policy. Large-scale assessments used for international benchmarking such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) routinely report the prevalence of academic resilience as a summary measure of system quality, combining efficiency (high achievement) and equity (reduced socio-economic disparities). Building on this approach, a large body of comparative research has sought to identify school- and system-level factors that promote resilience implicitly characterising resilience not as an individual trait but as a property of schools and systems. However, most of this evidence is based on cross-sectional data. Such approaches may overlook other factors, particularly students’ prior achievement, attributing excessive importance to school characteristics measured at a single point in time. Methods This study investigates whether academic resilience in Italy primarily reflects school characteristics at age 15 or earlier achievement differences established in primary school. We use unique longitudinal data linking Italian students’ achievement in PISA 2022 at age 15 to their standardized test scores from primary school (INVALSI, grades 2 and 5; N = 4,890) to disentangle the roles of school-level factors and early achievement in shaping academic resilience. Academic resilience is defined as being in the lowest quartile of socio-economic status and the top quartile of mathematics achievement in grade 10. We describe achievement trajectories by socio-economic group and estimate linear probability models, accounting for sampling design, to assess the relative contribution of prior achievement and school-level factors such as disciplinary climate, truancy, school track, teacher qualifications, and socio-economic composition. Results Socio-economic disparities in mathematics achievement emerge early and widen over time. Disadvantaged students are much less likely than their advantaged peers to be top achievers in grades 2, 5, and 10, and are more likely to remain among the lowest achievers. Prior achievement in primary school is the strongest predictor of later resilience among disadvantaged students. Higher truancy and a more disadvantaged school intake are associated with lower probabilities of resilience, but most school-level factors show weak or non-significant associations. Among initially high achievers, advantaged students are better able than disadvantaged peers to sustain top performance through grade 10. Conclusions Academic resilience in Italy appears to reflect achievement differences that are established early and stratified opportunities to maintain high performance rather than the impact of school characteristics measured at age 15. Cross-sectional indicators of resilient students or resilient schools should therefore be interpreted with caution as descriptive social indicators, not as direct measures of school effectiveness, and complemented with longitudinal evidence on learning trajectories.

Sociology has paid limited attention to the role of luck in shaping individualsocioeconomic outcomes. This study examines how luck, conceptualized as chance eventsthat provide or deplete resources for educational attainment, contributes to educationalinequalities by family socioeconomic status (SES). We theorize that unexplainedvariance in regression models can serve as an indirect indicator of both good and badluck. Building on the Breen and Goldthorpe model of educational inequality, weintroduce a stochastic component and derive a novel hypothesis: luck plays a greaterrole, and thus generates more variability in outcomes, when structural resources andindividual propensity for education are misaligned, specifically for low-SES students withhigh educational propensity and high-SES students with low propensity. We test thishypothesis using variance function regression models with sibling fixed effects on twoU.S. datasets. The results support our expectations: educational outcomes are mostvolatile when parental SES and educational propensity diverge, particularly among low-SES students with high propensity, whose attainment appears most exposed to chance.We conclude by discussing implications for the emerging sociology of luck and forresearch on inequality and mobility more broadly.

Immigrants typically have better health than natives upon arrival owing to health selection, but this advantage declines over time. This “Immigrant Health Paradox” (IHP) is generalized to all immigrant groups, without recognizing key differences between them. Research on the health of asylum seekers and refugees (AS&Rs) is mostly cross‐sectional, often lacks other immigrants or natives as control groups, and mainly focuses on psychopathological disorders. I bridge the literature on immigrant and AS&R health by investigating the health trajectories of AS&Rs vis‐à‐vis other immigrants and natives. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel (2015–2022), I examine general health, health concerns, and SF‐12 physical and mental health for AS&Rs and other immigrants arriving in the first half of the 2010s. I confirm the IHP for non‐AS&R immigrants, while the health trajectories of AS&Rs are more complex. AS&Rs have a mental health disadvantage upon arrival that is gradually closed, while they have a health advantage for other outcomes that is stable or increasing before declining. AS&R women have worse health than men, especially upon arrival. Results are consistent across specifications, including fixed effects models. My findings question the generalizability of the IHP and the assumption that AS&Rs are a negatively selected group.

Objective: To investigate the impact of various parental health shocks, including parental death, on young adults' life satisfaction and mental health, personality traits, as well as NEET status (i.e., being neither in employment, education, nor training). Background: Theoretical considerations and previous cross‐sectional studies suggest that parental health problems negatively affect child outcomes and may play an important role in the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Evidence remains limited, however, and several studies have found no or negligible effects when using designs that address unobserved confounding. Prior studies tend to investigate only a small set of parental shocks and child outcomes simultaneously, rarely having follow‐up periods beyond adolescence, and disproportionately focus on the Nordic countries. Method: We use data from the 1991–2021 waves of the nationally representative German Socio‐Economic Panel (SOEP) to investigate the impact of a wide range of parental health shocks (extended hospitalization, cancer, stroke, cardiac disease, depression, death). Child outcomes are assessed at ages 17 to 25 and include measures of life satisfaction, mental health, personality (locus of control, Big Five), and NEET status. We implement pooled cross‐sectional analyses conditioning on key observables as well as longitudinal individual and family fixed effects regressions to account for unobserved confounding. Results: Cross‐sectional results show that parental health shocks are associated with lower child life satisfaction and mental health, increased NEET risks, as well as higher neuroticism and a more external locus of control, but none of the other personality outcomes. Associations appear to be mostly due to confounding, however, since coefficients are strongly attenuated in longitudinal fixed effects models and only the associations with NEET status remain statistically significant. Conclusion: Children in Germany appear mostly resilient against serious parental health shocks. Although associations between parental health and child outcomes seem to be largely driven by selection effects, both parental and child health may still play an important role in the intergenerational transmission of inequality, for example, by mediating the effects of shared socio‐economic (dis)advantages or genetic predispositions.