Unfortunately this event has been cancelled. We will announce a new date/time for Dr. Cheng's talk in the future. Thank you.
Title: “Flows and Boundaries: Labor Market Mobility in a Network Framework”
Abstract: Although stratification research has long recognized the importance of mapping out the underlying boundaries that govern the flow of workers in the labor market, the current literature faces three major challenges: (1) the determination of mobility boundaries, (2) the incorporation of changes in mobility boundaries, and (3) the incorporation of multi-step flows. We propose a network framework that helps address these challenges. The framework conceptualizes the occupational system as a network, in which the nodes are the detailed occupations and the edges are defined by the volume and direction of workers who flow between the nodes. A flow-based community detection algorithm, known as Infomap, is introduced to uncover the mobility boundaries based on the observed mobility network. Applying this approach to analyze trends in intragenerational occupational mobility in the United States from 1989 to 2015, we find that the boundaries that constrain mobility opportunities have become increasingly rigid over time, while, at the same time, decoupled from the boundaries of big-classes and microclasses. Moreover, these boundaries are increasingly sorting workers into clusters of occupations with similar skill requirements.
