Working Papers

This paper investigates to what extent education is rewarded on the labour market because of the cognitive skills it indicates, using IALS data for the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands. By empirically distinguishing between general cognitive ability and work-specific cognitive ability, we show that the cognitive component of schooling is larger than anticipated by Bowles and Gintis (2000; 2002). Instead of around 20 percent of the education effect being cognitive, our results indicate that between 23 and 53 percent of the education effect is cognitive, depending on the country and operationalization of cognitive skills. Moreover, it was shown that the relative importance of general versus work-specific cognitive abilities varies systematically between countries, with a larger fraction of the schooling effect being captured by the work-specific component in Germany and the Netherlands than in the US and the UK. This is explained by the different role of schooling between countries. Importantly, controlling for allocative processes related to the industry, organization and occupation of employment was particularly relevant in Germany, which supports the notion that this country is most credentialized.

Aim of this work is to evaluate the overall effect of social origins on secondary school track enrolment in Italy, Germany and Netherlands, allowing for consistent cross country comparisons. PISA 2003 is employed. Track choices are assumed to depend on student’s ability and social origins; since proficiency before tracking is not observed, ability is not kept under control. Nonetheless, the unconditional social background effect is the quantity of main substantive interest because it represents the total effect of social origins on school choices.

Yet, since regression coefficients in logit models are biased even with independent unobserved heterogeneity, comparison across countries are difficult; the average sample derivative of the response probability is employed instead and it is showed to be a valid alternative measure of the total social origins effect. The following issue is also addressed: social origins inequality in secondary school choices may be affected by access restrictions policies, at work in some countries, where enrolment into the more prestigious tracks is subject to binding school recommendations or ability tests. First, we propose a simple theoretical model and we derive that the policy is expected to lower the effect of social origins conditional on ability, although the impact on the total effect can either decrease or increase. Second, by exploiting the institutional differences across German Länder with respect to enrolment policies, we carry out a preliminary empirical analysis within Germany. The main empirical findings are: (i) the total effect of social origins on track choice is weaker in the Netherlands and stronger in Germany, with Italy in between; (ii) within Germany, access restriction seem to weaken the parental background effect.

Aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of the relative contribution of primary and secondary effects in secondary school choices in Italy. Since prospective longitudinal data on schooling careers are not available for Italy, the analysis is based on the cross-sectional survey Percorsi di studio e di lavoro dei diplomati (ISTAT, 2004), which collects detailed information on individuals educational histories up to three years after the secondary school degree. A major issue to deal with is self-selection, as only secondary school graduates are interviewed. By employing the survey data together with administrative and census information, we derive estimates of the relevant distributions, correcting for selection bias. As lower secondary school final marks are assigned on a 4-level scale (satisfactory, good, very good, excellent), a semi-parametric version of the standard approach is adopted. The empirical evidence is that secondary effects account for a larger proportion of the social origin differential than primary effects; by comparing our estimates with those reported in the recent literature, we derive that the relative contribution of primary effects is substantially weaker in Italy than in the other countries.

Social mobility has become a topic of central political concern. In political and also media circles it is widely believed that in Britain today mobility is in decline. However, this belief appears to be based on a single piece of research by economists that is in fact concerned with intergenerational income mobility: specifically, with the relation between family income and children’s later earnings. Research by sociologists using the same data sources – the British birth cohort studies of 1958 and 1970 – but focusing on intergenerational class mobility does not reveal a declining trend either in total mobility rates or in underlying social fluidity. The paper aims to investigate these divergent findings. It is shown that they do not result from the use of different subsets of the data or of different analytical techniques. What is, rather, emphasised is that, as against the background of the more stable and generally less fluid class mobility regime, it is the high level of income mobility of 1958 cohort, rather than the lower level of the 1970 cohort, that is chiefly in need of explanation. Further analyses – including ones of the relative influence of parental class and of family income on children’s educational attainment – suggest that the economists’ finding of declining mobility between the two cohorts may stem, in part at least, from the fact that the family income variable for the 1958 cohort provides a less adequate measure of ‘permanent income’ than does that for the 1970 cohort. But, in any event, it would appear that the class mobility regime more fully captures the continuity in economic advantage and disadvantage that persists across generations.

Most of the empirical studies on education and fertility focus on characteristics of the female spouse. The role of the partner is often neglected. Yet, most children are fathered and grow up in a relationship. Hence, we assume that both partners’ education has to be regarded when analysing family formation. In our paper, we use couples as the unit of analyses and look at each partner’s education and the couple’s educational constellation, i.e. if both partners have the same educational level or if one partner is higher educated than the other. In our empirical analysis on first births we us the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP).

The paper examines the quality of educational information collected for the SILC database, concentrating on the following specific issues:

(1) The distribution of education along the ISCED 97 level categories
(2) The stability of education measures over successive survey years in EU-SILC
(3) Comparison of education measures in EU-SILC, EU-LFS and ESS
(4) Explanatory power of education as measured in EU-SILC

In EU-SILC education is measured along a simplified version of the International Standard Classification of Education 1997 (ISCED 97). The ISCED version used in the harmonized EU-SILC database distinguishes 6 levels of education. It neglects, however, any distinctions within levels of education according to the sub-dimensions programme orientation and programme destination, which, in principle, are also available in the ISCED 97-classification Roughly speaking, the former sub-dimension refers to the distinction between predominantly general/academic vs. predominantly vocational types of courses of study. This distinction is known to be quite crucial for a number of education related outcomes, such as for returns on the labour market, educational opportunities of children or various attitudinal or behavioural correlates of education.

In examining the 4 data quality aspects, mentioned above, the paper finds a number of serious problems in the measurement available for education in the EU-SILC data.
(1) As a consequence of using the simplified “only levels version” of the ISCED classification the resulting measurement of education comes out as a very rough classification with large proportions of the population coded into large highly heterogeneous categories. This is particularly true for ISCED level 3, but with increasing significance among the younger cohorts also for ISCED level 5. But even in countries, in which educational attainment is more evenly distributed among the various levels distinguished by ISCED, the lack of differentiation within heterogeneous categories can damage measurement quality. .
(2) In a number of countries the paper finds high measurement instability from wave to wave drawing into doubt the interwave reliability of the measures. Also in terms of criterion validity education measures in EU-SILC need improvement. In a few countries, the correlations between ISCED and ISEI (International Socio-Economic Index) vary considerably between waves.
(3) Even larger discrepancies in education distributions result from the comparison of education measures in EU-SILC and the education measures in EU-LFS in spite of the fact that both databases are produced by the same NSIs. In some of the countries, dissimilarities between the two sources are rather large.
(4) Neglecting the vocational/general distinction can lead to substantial heterogeneity within the aggregated levels of education in terms of the various correlates of education. The explanatory power of education (as measured e.g. by the variance explained) is considerably underestimated when vocational and general courses of study are not distinguished.
In comparative research these issues lead to a further problem: The significance of the vocational / general distinction likely varies between countries, and therefore, the explanatory power of educational attainment is likely to be attenuated in different ways and to a different extent in different countries. Thus, cross-national comparisons based on the simplified ISCED used in EU-SILC (and other cross-national surveys) are likely to be seriously misleading.

This paper provides the main theoretical references and some empirical data in order to produce the basic elements for a future comparison of the relationship between vocational and general education in France and Germany, both at secondary and post-secondary level. Recent changes concerning Higher education in both countries are presented and the role or influence of European process on these changes are investigated.

Abstract

Recent research on social inequality and the family has pointed out that partners provide an important social context for individuals’ decisions, behaviour and resulting social outcomes. Unemployment is a particularly interesting issue to be studied in the context of partnership, as unemployment and the ensuing loss of income of one partner might affect the whole family, and fast re-employment reduces the risks of economic uncertainty and deprivation of the family. However, the particular effects of the partner and his or her resources on unemployment of the other and its duration have not yet been fully explored.
In our paper we examine how couples deal with each other’s unemployment, i.e. whether and how quickly re-integration into the labour market occurs. We look at the effects of different kinds of partner’s resources, in particular financial assets and social capital. Applying job search theory, one would expect that the more financial support the partner can provide, the longer an unemployment episode would last, whereas the higher the partner’s social capital, the more likely a job offer is to occur. Economic theories assume negative effects of both the partner’s financial resources and social capital on the other’s re-employment chances, either due to specialisation gains in the joint household or due to individual maximising of bargaining power that keeps the better-off partner from sharing resources. Whereas these theories are gender-neutral, gender role theories predict differential effects of the partner’s resources for women and men. If a male partner provides a high income during his wife’s unemployment this could prevent her from taking up work again. In the opposite case, this relationship of available resources and unemployment duration could be weak or non-existent. This ‘gender asymmetry’ should be modified by two characteristics: first, the birth cohorts the partners belong to, and second, whether or not they have children.
Empirically, we test these hypotheses using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), a longitudinal household survey. Based on this data source we analyse the effects of the partner’s resources on unemployment duration by applying event-history models. We find a partnership premium for men, whereas married women are least likely to leave unemployment. Regarding the role of different resources of the partner, men gain from their spouse’s labour market resources. Surprisingly, for women the partner’s income accelerates re-employment. However, this finding is mediated by the fact that in a traditional male breadwinner model the female minor earner refrains from re-entering paid work. Furthermore, we cannot detect historical changes, but strong differences for women with and without children.