Richard Breen Annual Report 2004 -2005

Richard Breen (Official Fellow). My edited volume Social Mobility in Europe was published by OUP in December 2004 but work in this area is continuing. This includes a paper, co-authored with Ruud Luijkx (Tilburg University), Walter Müller and Reinhard Pollak (both University of Mannheim) on inequality of educational opportunity in nine European countries during the 20th century, and a paper with Janne Jonsson (SOFI, Stockholm) reviewing recent work on inequality in social mobility and educational attainment, which will appear later this year in Annual Review of Sociology. A joint paper with Cecilia García-Peñalosa (GREQAM, Marseille) on the relationship between income inequality and macro-economic volatility was published in Review of Development Economics and we are continuing our work on income inequality in a new project, which has some funding from CNRS, on the role of capital income in accounting for levels and trends in income inequality between households in the UK, US, France, Germany and Sweden.

I spent Trinity 2004 on sabbatical at the Juan March Institute in Madrid and afterwards I visited GREQAM for three weeks: in both places I was made welcome and spent a fruitful and enjoyable time. I have returned with a deeper appreciation of the research facilities provided by Nuffield. During the year I was appointed to the Editorial Board of the Annual Review of Sociology, to the Scientific Advisory Board of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research and to the Standing Committee of Section S4 (Sociology, Demography and Social Statistics) of the British Academy.

I gave seminars at the University of Edinburgh, the Institute for Education, London, and at the University of Bamberg. In January 2005 I delivered the first in the series of lectures to mark the inauguration of Oxford’s Centre for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences.

Publications

Social Mobility in Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2004.

‘Explaining Cross-national Variation in Youth Unemployment: Market and Institutional Factors’, European Sociological Review, 21, 2, 125-134, 2005.

(with Cecilia García-Peñalosa) ‘Income Inequality and Macroeconomic Volatility: An Empirical Investigation’, Review of Development Economics, 9, 3, 380-398, 2005.

(with Lynn Prince Cooke) ‘The Persistence of the Gendered Division of Domestic Labour’, European Sociological Review, 21, 1, 43-57, 2005.

(with Pasi Moisio) ‘Poverty Dynamics Corrected for Measurement Error’, The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2, 3, 171-191, 2004.

‘Foundations of Class Analysis in the Weberian Tradition’, in Erik Olin Wright (ed.), Alternative Foundations of Class Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp 31-50.

‘Why Did Class Inequalities in Educational Attainment Remain Unchanged over Much of the Twentieth Century?’, in A F Heath, J Ermisch and D Gallie (eds.), Understanding Social Change: Proceedings of the British Academy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp 55-72.