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Citation
Schoenholzer, K. (2026). Cumulative advantage in the early career: Within-person dynamics of the graduate income advantage in five countries. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 106, 101216. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2026.101216
Abstract
Cumulative advantage theory predicts that graduates pull further ahead of non-graduates as they age. The claim concerns change within persons, yet most comparative evidence is cross-sectional. Cross-sections confound life-course change with the composition of cohorts. Panel comparisons of cohorts add a second confound, because each cohort is observed over a different age window. We use harmonized panel data from the Comparative Panel File for Australia, Great Britain, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States, covering birth cohorts 1950–1990. We estimate the within-person change in the graduate-nongraduate gap in income rank with person fixed-effects models, separately by career-stage age band, so that cohorts are compared at the same stage. The advantage compounds only early. Between ages 25 and 34 the gap widens within persons by 0.37 percentile points per year, in all five countries. Between 35 and 44 it is nearly flat. It narrows late in the career, by 0.63 points per year at ages 55–64. Cohorts compared at the same career stage share this shape, and the differences among them do not follow birth year. The results hold in log income, for lower and upper tertiary degrees, and among graduates in graduate-level occupations. The late narrowing holds for both sexes. Cumulative advantage in income position is therefore a feature of the early career, not of the career as a whole. Analyses that compare cohorts over different age windows can mistake this career-stage pattern for cohort change. Our design makes that risk explicit and avoids it.