Gaia Ghirardi

Job loss is a disruptive event that results in long-term economic scarring, though effects vary across social groups. This study explores a new potential source of inequality in the impact of job loss by examining whether genetic traits can amplify or attenuate earning declines following job loss. To address bias from gene-environment correlations, we compare interactions between polygenic indices (PGIs) and both endogenous job loss (individual unemployment) and exogenous job loss (plant closures). We focus on PGIs for depression, educational attainment, and risk-taking. Using Finnish population register data linked to genetic information for approximately 10,000 individuals observed over ten years, we apply a difference-in-differences design. We find persistent earnings losses following job loss, with larger declines for endogenous unemployment spells. Genetic moderation is observed only for plant closures: individuals with higher depression-related PGIs experience greater earnings declines. No comparable interactions emerge for endogenous job loss or the other PGIs.

Family income volatility harms children's education, and prior research finds the penalty is concentrated not among poor households but among middle- and high-income ones. Income instability disproportionately hurts children whose parents are, in stable times, best positioned to invest in their education, a pattern that remains poorly understood. We argue that income volatility disrupts parental strategies: compensation and boosting, through which parents with more resources shape their children's educational trajectories according to their genetic propensity for education. Using genotyped parent-offspring trios from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, we combine repeated measures of household income and income dynamics with children's polygenic index for educational attainment to predict adolescents’ secondary school test scores, controlling for parents' genotype to partial out genetic nurture. We find that, among middle-income families, the volatility penalty concentrates among children with low genetic propensity, consistent with a missing compensation mechanism. Among high-income families, the penalty falls instead on children with average-to-high propensities, consistent with a missing boosting mechanism. These findings suggest that income volatility does not simply destabilize resources, but it disables the specific strategies that advantaged parents use to reproduce their advantages across generations.

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.

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.

This short article investigates how childcare arrangements under age three affect early social inequalities in children's competencies using a novel decomposition approach ( Yu and Elwert, 2024 ). This framework comprehensively assesses the relevance of childcare arrangements and the channels through which they influence social disparity levels: unequal exposure (prevalence), heterogeneous effects, and selection (within-group treatment propensity). Drawing on the newborn cohort of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS - SC1), we evaluate the influence of center-based early childhood education and care (ECEC), family day care, grandparents/relatives care, and exclusive parental care under the age of three on children's competencies in mathematics and vocabulary at ages 4 and 5. Findings confirm that center-based ECEC is the most effective at reducing social disparities, particularly benefiting low-socioeconomic status (SES) children. The heterogeneous effect emerges thus as the only relevant mechanism that tackles early disparities. Conversely, although not statistically significant, exclusive parental care and family day care appear to slightly favor high-SES children and may be detrimental to less advantaged groups. Overall, this approach comprehensively evaluates how childcare arrangements shape early social inequalities in children's competencies.

Prior research has consistently documented a more pronounced negative impact of parental separation on educational attainment among children from families with high socioeconomic status (SES). This study leverages molecular data to investigate how the parental separation penalty on educational attainment varies by SES and children's genetic propensity for education. We replicate the analysis on two distinct datasets, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and the Health and Retirement Study. We use parametric (ordinary least-squares and logit) and nonparametric models (LOWESS), with college attainment and years of education as the dependent variables and the mother's education as an indicator of family SES. Our results show that the parental separation penalty clusters among high-SES students with a low genetic propensity for education. For high-SES students with nonseparated parents, the probability of college attainment and completing more years of education is largely independent of their genetic propensity for education but decreases if they have a low genetic propensity for education and their parents separate. These findings suggest that when high-SES parents separate, they experience a reduced capacity to compensate for their children's low genetic propensity for education to boost college attainment and years of education.