Studying Inequality with Administrative Data: Mobility, Life-Course Dynamics, and Workplace Inequality

In recent years, linked employer-employee data have become increasingly central to inequality research (e.g., Godechot 2024; Penner et al. 2023; Song et al. 2015; Tomaskovic-Devey et al. 2020). Building on a long tradition that highlights the role of organizations in structuring labor market inequality (Baron and Bielby 1980; Tilly 1998; Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt 2019), linked employer-employee data offer a powerful opportunity to place workplaces at the center of inequality research and examine how inequality is produced through organizational processes and interactions within workplaces. Studies using these data consistently reveal substantial variation in inequality patterns across workplaces, demonstrating that wages, benefits, and other opportunities are shaped not only by individual characteristics or national institutions, but also by where people work. This panel seeks to move beyond documenting workplace variation by advancing new approaches to identifying and analyzing common inequality regimes across workplaces (Acker 2006).

The papers in this panel use linked employer-employee data to identify typologies of workplaces, examine cross-national variation in these typologies, and trace how workplace inequality regimes change over time. Together, they offer new empirical strategies for studying workplace inequality regimes and provide fresh evidence on how organizations produce, reproduce, or mitigate inequality in contemporary labor markets.