Academic literature on the topic 'HISCLASS'

This article examines socioeconomic mobility across three generations in Sweden from 1815 and until 2011. Using longitudinal micro-level data from the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD), we examine the transmission of socio-economic status along three different dimensions; social class (HISCLASS), occupational status (HISCAM), and earnings. We demonstrate an association between grandfathers' class or occupational status and the outcome of grandsons, when controlling for the association between fathers and sons. The associations remain stable over time and are stronger for paternal grandfathers than for maternal. For earnings, we find no grandparental association.

ABSTRACTThis article studies the effects of marriage partner choice on occupational attainment and mobility in five rural parishes in southern Sweden between about 1815 and 1894. It uses an individual-level database containing information on a large number of marriages and the occupational origin of the marrying couple, regardless of whether they were born in the parish or not. Occupations are coded in HISCO and classified using HISCLASS. The results indicate the presence of occupational homogamy in this rural society. The social origin of the partner also mattered a great deal for subsequent occupational attainment and mobility, both upwards and downwards.

Abstract We examine the effect of technical change on human capital formation during England's Industrial Revolution. Using the number of steam engines installed by 1800 as a synthetic indicator of technological change and occupational statistics to measure working skills (using HISCLASS), we establish a positive correlation between the use of steam engines and the share of skilled workers at the county level. We use exogenous variation in carboniferous rock strata (containing coal to fuel the engines) to show that the effect was causal. While technological change stimulated the formation of working skills, it had an overall negative effect on the formation of primary education, captured by literacy and school enrolment rates. It also led to higher gender inequality in literacy.

This article studies the relation between rural-urban migration and the upward and downward social mobility of different social groups from the perspective of the sending countryside and not of the receiving city. It utilizes two datasets regarding people born in the Groningen clay soil region (the Netherlands). By applying a revised version of HISCLASS for social stratification, it compares the social mobility of urban migrants with those staying in the countryside. Analysis of both databases shows distinct social differences in rural-urban migration, with children from non-agrarian rural elite families moving very frequently to a city; whereas, children from farmers and unskilled (farm) labourers were much less attracted by urban centres, despite restricted job opportunities in agriculture. Children from lower managers, skilled and lower-skilled workers in industry and services took an intermediate posi­tion. For all social groups (except for children of farmers), male urban migrants had on average a better social mobility performance than rural stayers, whereas for females the differences were rather limit­ed. Children of unskilled workers, who rarely went to large cities, were far more successful than rural stayers. This suggests a positive selection. For Groningen, the findings oppose the pessimistic view of nineteenth and early-twentieth century rural-urban migrants mainly being pushed to the city by local circumstances, although their social opportunities in the countryside were indeed limited. The detailed database shows also that even a temporary movement to the city resulted on average in an improved social mobility performance, an indication that urban migrants of nearly all social backgrounds often accrued extra human capital during their stay in a large city.

Este artículo analiza las similitudes y diferencias más significativas en los procesos de inserción de nativos e inmigrantes en el mercado laboral madrileño entre 1880 y 1930. Variables como las habilidades requeridas en el ejercicio de un oficio, su posición jerárquica en el seno de una escala profesional, la edad del individuo o su naturaleza geográfica resultaron decisivas en la asimilación económica y social de ambos grupos a un entorno que experimentó transformaciones relevantes durante esos decenios. A través de la utilización de una metodología novedosa, cimentada en dos herramientas clasificatorias de profesiones adaptadas a los Padrones de Habitantes de Madrid (HISCO e HISCLASS), este trabajo buscará determinar el comportamiento selectivo de un mercado laboral que llevó a establecer claras distinciones de estatus social entre sus componentes en función de su procedencia.

In the last few years the technology question became one of the most important argument debated both inside and outside academia. For example, employment has been reshaped by dramatic events like the Great Recession and the Covid-19 but also by a quieter ongoing evolution in the mix and location of jobs. In the last fifty years the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has led to a transformation of production and employment structures. In the decade ahead, the next wave of artificial intelligence (AI) technology may accelerate the pace of change. Millions of jobs could be phased out even as new ones are created. More broadly, the nature of work could change for nearly everyone as new machines become fixtures in the workplace throughout the world. As intellectual exercise, social scientists develop different ways to interpret such changes, and broadly speaking there are two main views of technological change, one optimistic and one pessimistic. Among the optimists we find, for example, Levy and Murnane (2013) who argued that we can ‘dance’ with robots because as in previous waves of technical change technological change has if anything a galvanizing effect on jobs, increasing demand for labor and raising wages. Contrarily, pessimists propose a link between job polarization and technological change, arguing that decreases are caused by concentration among middle-skilled jobs of “routine” tasks, which are easier to automate due to defined set of standard instruction, as documented by Autor (2019). Historically, the relationships between technology and employment have long been at the heart of economic theory and history. Classical economists such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and social scientists as Joseph Schumpeter, had already identified technological change as a fundamental factor explaining changes in terms of division of labor, quality and quantity of labor demand, as well as income structures. The question of whether technology creates or destroys jobs is also the starting point for many recent studies that have examined the effects of different types of technologies and the structural factors that influence the amount of employment change. Qualitative aspects have received increasing attention, with the analysis of the type of jobs that are created or destroyed by new technologies, of how change the composition of skills and of wages. But, in this way, what is the difference between Charlot of Modern Times (1936) and today’s workers? Can we reconstruct the line of evolution from then to present day? This thesis aims to contribution to the production and discussion of quantitative evidence on the relationship between technology and work in Italy in historical perspective (1871-2011). The reason for this choice derives from the observation of the persistence of the lack of this data. Therefore, the adoption of a historical-quantitative approach seemed to be inevitable in such a circumstance to delve into the following main four issues: First, how does technology redefine the skills of workers? Second, does all new technology lead to de-skilling or does certain technology improve or even create skill? Third, how are skills distributed? Fourth, does all technology have the same impact on work skills or do the specific and idiosyncratic features of those skills have an effect? The research is divided as follows: the first chapter investigates the historical and economic literature over the last two centuries, exploring the multiple dimensions and the direction of theories and studies on technology and labor. The central questions across two centuries of historical literature may be classified according to two of main effects. Among technology’s effects can be to enable skills, to complement them (enabling technologies), or to replace them altogether (replacing technologies). The second chapter presents the new dataset of Italian occupations, the “Unified Italian historical Database of Occupations” (UIHDO) based on the professional classification of Italian demographic censuses (1871-2011) according to the HISCO-HISCLASS framework. This section describes how the Italian database was constructed and considers its shortcomings. The third chapter analyzes the effects of technologies on the quantity and quality of Italian workers in terms of skills, the dynamics of the arrival of new jobs and the exit of others and the rise and fall of middle-skilled workers. I use the technological change framework because that capture the evolution of concrete types of technology and their different power of change when applied to employment, actual work functions and the skills of the people doing the jobs. Finally, appendices present supplemented materials that clarify the methodologies and expand the information for each census.