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Between 1995 and 2012, the wage distribution of male workers in Brazil shifted to the right and became less dispersed. This paper attempts to identify the reasons for that movement in male wage distribution, focusing on the impact of education expansion on wage distribution. The Oaxaca-Blinder (OB) and Recentered Influence Function (RIF) decomposition results show that both changes in returns on skills and upgrades in the composition of work skills contribute to increases in the average wage and wages at the 10th and 50th percentiles. The shifts in returns to skills had a decreasing impact on wages at the 90th percentile and are identified as the primary force reducing wage inequality. Education expansion had an equalizing impact on wage distribution, primarily through the decline in return to education.

This paper attempts to interpret the Bartholomew (1973) index of mobility in terms of a directional mobility index based on the one-step expected states of movement corresponding to a specific state of transition matrix. A partial ordering of directional mobility of a general state of transition matrices, referred to as “upward mobility favoring sequential averaging (UMFSA),” is proposed using the algebraic equivalent of the generalized Lorenz ordering of expected states. When the underlying mobility depends on the initial distribution of the states, using a Bayesian approach, the indices are reexamined for a general class of matrices. This enables us to interpret the Prais (1955) and Bibby (1975) mobility index in this framework.

Parents are sometimes perceived as barriers to providing comprehensive and inclusive sexuality education to young people. However, little is known about parents’ actual attitudes towards providing such broad information to young people. The purpose of this paper is to examine two different approaches to measuring parents’ attitudes towards sexuality information, a programme title approach and a topic-centred approach.

Illinois parents of adolescents (n=301) indicated their knowledge about and attitudes towards sexuality education programmes and 18 sexual health topics via online survey. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine whether parents’ attitudes were more consistent with a programme-centred (i.e. abstinence-only, comprehensive) or a topic-centred (i.e. physical health, sexual and gender identity, pleasure, and relationships) approach.

Parents were uncertain about what form of sexuality education was offered but most were equally comfortable with both abstinence-only and comprehensive programmes. Parents’ ratings of topics grouped significantly better by the topic-centred than the programme-centred approach. Parents rated all four subjects as important, with the highest mean ratings given to physical health topics. Further, parents’ ratings of importance by subject matter were largely independent of their reported programming preference. Together these findings provide evidence that parents believe it is important for their children to have access to a broad range of sexual health education information.

This study is one of the first to document parents’ support for information for young people that goes beyond being comprehensive to include topics such as identities and pleasure. In addition, parents’ lack of knowledge about sexuality education programming may obscure their support for sexual health information. Measuring support by specific topics, however, can help to overcome issues due to parents’ lack of knowledge about programming.