Social position from narrative data

Abstract

This paper develops an individual-level index of human capital, estimated as the potential hourly wage that this might command in the UK in the mid 1990s. It compares the performance of this as a predictor of life chances (in the areas of finance and health) with a conventional class indicator designed for this purpose (the continuous indicator in fact performs approximately as well as the categorical class indicator), and illustrates the usefulness of the continuously scaled indicator through a model of historical change in the impact of work-breaks on women's economic resources.