HISTCLASS Paradoxes of wealth and class: historical conditions and contemporary configurations

• Schnitzlein, Daniel D.; Lersch, Philipp M. & Wiborg, Øyvind Nicolay (2026). Intragenerational mobility in wealth in Germany, Norway, and Britain: Descriptive evidence. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. ISSN 0276-5624. 106. doi: 10.1016/j.rssm.2026.101206. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  We study intragenerational wealth rank mobility, investigating three dimensions: (i) wealth mobility over the life cycle, (ii) heterogeneity in mobility among subgroups and wealth components, and (iii) commonalities and differences across divergent country contexts. We use data from Germany (SOEP, N = 12,380 individuals), Norway (administrative register data, N = 3460,602), and Britain (BHPS, N = 7910; UKHLS, N = 18,428), examining intraindividual rank-rank correlations, the distribution of rank changes, and rank mobility curves. We find substantial wealth mobility, which is often short-range. Mobility increases with the observation window (5, 10, 15 years). Wealth mobility is highest in Norway, followed by similar mobility in Britain and Germany. Furthermore, early life cycle stages and parental tertiary education are associated with greater mobility, whereas gender differences are small. Mobility is higher in financial than in housing wealth, but remains substantial in the latter. Our findings reveal substantial but predominantly short-range wealth mobility, indicating that individual wealth positions are less static than cross-sectional distributions suggest, even as the overall structure of inequality persists.

• Thomsen, Jens-Peter; Andrade, Stefan Bastholm; Hertel, Florian R.; Thaning, Max & Wiborg, Øyvind Nicolay (2026). Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Scandinavia and the United States. Sociology of education. ISSN 0038-0407. doi: 10.1177/00380407261424502. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Intergenerational educational mobility reflects a welfare state's ability to provide citizens with opportunities to climb the social ladder. Representing two distinct welfare state types, studies have contrasted mobility patterns in Scandinavia and the United States but have provided no consistent answer as to who achieves the highest level of intergenerational educational mobility. We conduct a meticulous examination of intergenerational educational mobility in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the United States for cohorts born between 1958 and 1987 using comparable operationalizations and methods and the best available data (administrative data in Scandinavia and eight surveys in the United States). We focus on methods that capture relative mobility. Across models, we find that inequality in Scandinavia is 20 percent to 30 percent lower than in the United States. A multiverse analysis, which can run a large number of models within a single framework, shows that our results are robust to alternative variable specifications.

• Wiborg, Øyvind Nicolay & Gugushvili, Alexi (2025). Does partnership predict mortality? Evidence from a twin fixed effects study design. SSM - Population Health. ISSN 2352-8273. 30. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2025.101805. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This study examines the association between partnership status and mortality, addressing methodological concerns such as selection effects and unobserved heterogeneity. Utilizing Norwegian administrative data on birth cohorts from 1955 to 1975, we analyze mortality outcomes using Kaplan-Meier survival analyses and Cox proportional hazards regression models. The dataset includes over 1.2 million individuals and distinguishes between partnered and non-partnered individuals. While results for the general population show that non-partnered individuals face significantly higher mortality risks, with hazard ratios of 1.59 for men and 1.47 for women, twin fixed effects models reveal no significant relationship between partnership status and mortality. This finding suggests that much of the observed association may be due to shared genetic and environmental factors rather than a direct causal effect of partnership status. By leveraging the twin fixed effects research design, this study provides a robust test of the partnership-mortality hypothesis, highlighting the importance of controlling for unobserved heterogeneity in observational research. Our results underscore the complexity of the partnership-health nexus and call for caution in interpreting simple associations as evidence of causality.

• Gugushvili, Alexi & Wiborg, Øyvind Nicolay (2025). Wealth and mortality among late-middle-aged individuals in Norway: a nationwide register-based retrospective study. The Lancet Regional Health - Europe. 48. doi: 10.1016/j.lanepe.2024.101113. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In recent decades, we have observed rising wealth inequality while the pace of growth of life expectancy has slowed in many Western welfare democracies. There is scarce evidence, however, on links between wealth and mortality. The main methodological limitation in this area of scholarship is its inability to account for individuals' unobserved heterogeneity, such as personality and genetic factors, which could potentially affect both their wealth level and survival probabilities. This study aims to explore how wealth is linked to mortality risk in late-middle age, providing insights into the broader implications of socioeconomic status on health outcomes. In this study, we use high-quality register data on wealth and mortality for the entire population of Norway, one of the world's most advanced welfare states with a low income inequality level but a highly uneven distribution of wealth. We address some of the main methodological constraints of the previous research by exploring if wealth at the age of 37–38 predicts mortality up to age 62. The research design employed mitigates the problem of unobserved heterogeneity by using sibling and twin fixed-effects models. Both Kaplan–Meier survival analyses and the Cox proportional hazard regression results suggest that wealth is an important predictor of mortality even after individuals' observed and unobserved characteristics are accounted for with hazard ratios of 2.39 [95% confidence interval, CI 2.02, 2.83] among men and 1.74 [95% CI 1.39, 2.16] among women for the inverted cumulative density rank coefficients. The most disadvantaged groups are non-partnered men and women at the lower end of wealth distribution. Twin analyses align with the findings for the general population, indicating that wealth's effect on mortality is not confounded by genetic or shared family background factors. Our findings suggest that wealth is an important predictor of mortality, even in an advanced welfare state with comprehensive healthcare provisions, highlighting the need to address inequalities in wealth distribution to improve population health outcomes.

• Strømme, Thea Bertnes & Wiborg, Øyvind Nicolay (2024). Social origins and educational attainment: The unique contributions of parental education, class, and financial resources over time. British Journal of Sociology. ISSN 0007-1315. 75(4), p. 400–419. doi: 10.1111/1468-4446.13091. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This study examines the unique contributions of parental wealth, class background, education, and income to different measures of educational attainment. We build on recent sibling correlation approaches to estimate, using Norwegian register data, the gross and net contribution of each social origin dimension across almost 3 decades of birth cohorts. Our findings suggest that parental education is crucial for all measures of children's educational outcomes in all models. In the descriptive analyses, we find that while broad education measures remain stable or decrease over time, attaining higher tertiary education and elite degrees is more stable or increasingly dependent on family background, especially parental financial resources. While gross sibling correlation models show somewhat decreasing trends in the contribution of education in all measures of educational outcomes, net models show that the unique contributions of financial resources have increased over time. Our results lend some support to the idea of education as a positional good and suggest that educational inequalities reflect broader patterns of inequality in society. Our results further indicate that the importance of parental education and cultural capital for children's education can be explained by within‐resource transmission but that pro‐educational norms tied to wealth may play an increasingly important role in educational mobility. In summary, this study sheds light on the multidimensional nature of social origins and highlights the role of different factors in shaping educational outcomes over time.

• Grätz, Michael & Wiborg, Øyvind Nicolay (2024). Parental ages and the intergenerational transmission of education: evidence from Germany, Norway, and the United States. European Societies. ISSN 1461-6696. 26(5), p. 1444–1471. doi: 10.1080/14616696.2024.2310011. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The diverging destinies hypothesis predicts that educational inequality increases in contemporary societies because parents with higher levels of education postpone the birth of their children. This hypothesis is supported by empirical evidence demonstrating that advanced parental ages improve children’s educational outcomes. However, the consequences of socioeconomic differences in parental ages for the intergenerational transmission of education also depend on whether the associations between parental ages and child education vary by parental education. To test this hypothesis, we use data from three countries representing different welfare regimes: Germany, Norway, and the United States. In all three countries, children’s educational attainment at the secondary school level increases with higher parental ages more in families with low than in families with highly educated parents. In other words, the intergenerational transmission of education is stronger for younger than for older parents. Consequently, our findings nuance the diverging destinies hypothesis by demonstrating that increasing parental ages in socioeconomically disadvantaged families increases educational mobility more than decreasing parental ages in socioeconomically advantaged families. These findings are qualitatively the same in all three countries, suggesting that diverging destinies also occur in countries outside the United States.

• Toft, Maren (2023). Nation-builders and market architects: How social origins mold the careers of law graduates over 200 years in Norway. British Journal of Sociology. ISSN 0007-1315. 75(1), p. 108–131. doi: 10.1111/1468-4446.13066. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Abstract This paper examines the types of work that jurists have historically undertaken and maps how opportunities for legal practice have been shaped by social origins across three centuries: after constitutional independence in the mid‐1800s, during nascent industrial capitalism in the mid‐1900s, and at present‐day advanced capitalism. I analyze historical archive data on law graduates from the 19th and 20th centuries in combination with administrative registry data from the 1990s onwards and employ correspondence analysis to explore how social backgrounds shape careers, considering transformations in class structures and the changing significance of juridical expertise over time. Within each period, jurists have served in very different roles including those that craft and cater to the institutional make‐up of the state and the markets. My analysis shows that the impact of social origin on occupational outcomes has undergone significant changes, mirroring shifts in the broader social structure; from the importance of legal and political capital (within regional jurisdictions) in the 19th century to the significance of economic capital as the main structuring principle, but also a greater significance of cultural capital, in contemporary times. The ability to reach the most powerful positions among law graduates—within the polity in the 19th century, and the economy in the 21st century—has been differently structured by origins. I argue that expansion of the student body, the declining standing of the university, and heightened differentiation of the social structure and the juridical field have made intimate familiarity with the business world pivotal for forging mutually beneficial alliances between jurists and the increasingly dominant capitalist class. Today, a select group of jurists have managed to connect with and contribute to the rising power of private capital. Thus, the historical tale of jurists cannot be accurately captured by notions of uniform descent from national power structures.

• Schulz, Jeremy; Wiborg, Øyvind & Robinson, Laura (2023). Zooming Versus Slacking: Videoconferencing, Instant Messaging, and Work-from-Home Intentions in the Early Pandemic. American Behavioral Scientist. ISSN 0002-7642. doi: 10.1177/00027642231155364. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article explores key determinants of the intention to work from home (WFH) among U.S. adults in the early phase of the pandemic. Leveraging nationally representative survey data collected in the initial stages of the pandemic, it explores the role of modalities of communication alongside the more frequently studied behavioral, occupational, and sociodemographic factors in shaping WFH intentions as reported by survey respondents. Venturing beyond prior studies of remote work and remote work intentions, the study finds that the frequency of text messaging platform (e.g., Slack) usage and the frequency of videoconferencing (e.g., Zoom) exhibit diametrically opposed effects on the intentions to WFH in the future. Whereas a higher frequency of text messaging platform usage is linked to a preference for more intensive future WFH, a higher frequency of videoconferencing platform usage is associated with the opposite preference. Additionally, the effect of the intensity of respondents’ engagement with these two communication modalities on their intentions is mediated by pre-pandemic WFH experience as well as the intensity of interruptions in their WFH environment. Intensive videoconferencers (Zoomers) who work in high-interruption environments are particularly averse to future WFH. Conversely, intensive messagers (Slackers) who work from home substantially prior to the pandemic report express a preference for more frequent WFH in the future.

• Hansen, Marianne Nordli (2023). Økonomiske eliter og økonomisk makt. Norsk sosiologisk tidsskrift. 7(4-5), p. 92–109. doi: 10.18261/nost.7.4-5.7. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Stor formue kan være en betydelig kilde til makt over økonomiske investeringer, men også gjennom påvirkning i politikk og samfunnsliv. Norge og andre skandinaviske land betraktes gjerne som spesielt egalitære, men karakteriseres av en høy grad av ulikhet i formue. Dette innebærer at det ikke minst er viktig å forske på formuesfordelingen for å avdekke maktforhold i Norge. Makt- og demokratiutredningen 1998–2003 adresserte i liten grad spørsmål om hva fordelingen av rikdom betyr for makt og demokrati, og posisjonsmetoden som ble brukt er lite egnet til å identifisere dem med mest økonomisk makt. Spørsmålene som reises i artikkelen er: I hvilken grad er formue skjevt fordelt og hvem er de som har mest formue? I hvilken grad og på hvilken måte skiller eiere seg fra toppledere når det gjelder besittelse av formue? I hvilken grad vedvarer formue over generasjonene, og hvilke mekanismer bidrar til varig rikdom? Samlet sett tyder både inntekt og yrkestilhørighet at de rikeste i hovedsak er del av en økonomisk overklasse som er involvert i næringslivet, både gjennom å ha ledende stillinger og som eiere. Blant konsernsjefer er det kun en minoritet som er blant de aller rikeste. De aller rikeste utgjør en rentenistklasse i den forstad at kapitalinntekter utgjør deres hovedinntekter. Det er en sterk tendens til at barn født inn i rike familier i den økonomiske overklassen selv blir rike.

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• Toft, Maren (2023). Dynastic cores and the borrowed time of newcomers. Full text in Research Archive

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