In the 1960s, educational reforms have been initiated in Germany to make the rigid stratified school system more permeable. While maintaining between-school tracking in secondary education, several second-chance options have been introduced that established alternative routes to higher education. This study aims to evaluate whether these alternative routes were successful in reducing the levels of … Read more
Diversion or inclusion? Alternative routes to higher education eligibility and inequality in educational attainment in Germany
Analysing Diversion Processes in German Secondary Education: School-Track Effects on Educational Aspirations
Educational aspirations can be regarded as a predictor of final educational attainment, rendering this construct highly relevant for analysing the development of educational inequalities in panel data settings. In the context of the German tracked secondary school system, we analysed school-track effects on the development of educational aspirations. Using data from five consecutive waves of the … Read more
Relative risk aversion models: How plausible are their assumptions?
This work examines the validity of the two main assumptions of relative risk-aversion models of educational inequality. We compare the Breen-Goldthorpe (BG) and the Breen-Yaish (BY) models in terms of their assumptions about status maintenance motives and beliefs about the occupational risks associated with educational decisions. Concerning the first assumption, our contribution is threefold. First, … Read more
Is vocational education a safety net? The occupational attainment of upper secondary graduates from vocational and academic tracks in Italy
This article assesses the employment and occupational outcomes of upper secondary education graduates from academic and vocational tracks in Italy. In particular, we formulate and test the hypothesis that – contrary to some common expectations – academic graduates outperform vocational graduates at a stage of occupational maturity, even when considering individuals without a tertiary degree. Moreover, we … Read more
Gender segregation in higher education: an empirical test of seven explanations
Gender segregation in higher education (GSHE) is recognized as a key factor to explain the persistence of gender inequalities in the labor market despite the reversal of gender gap in educational attainment. Women are systematically overrepresented in fields of study, such as social sciences and the humanities, which offer relatively poor labor market prospects; at … Read more
COVID-19 and educational inequality: How school closures affect low- and high-achieving students
In spring 2020, governments around the globe shut down schools to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus. We argue that low-achieving students may be particularly affected by the lack of educator support during school closures. We collect detailed time-use information on students before and during the school closures in a survey of 1099 parents … Read more
Age at Parents’ Separation and Achievement: Evidence from France Using a Sibling Approach
This paper investigates the link between parental separation and children’s achievement in adulthood. Using a French dataset on “Education-Training-Employment”, I first estimate a random effects model and then examine the differences in age at divorce for children within the same family, to control for divorced family selection. Three outcomes are analysed: number of years of … Read more
Ranking populations in terms of inequality of health opportunity: A flexible latent type approach
We offer a flexible latent type approach to rank populations according to unequal health opportunities. Building upon the latent-class method, an approch increasingly adopted to estimate health inequalities, our contribution is to let the number of socioeconomic groups considered vary to obtain an opportunity-inequality curve for a population that gives how the between-type inequality varies with the … Read more
Children’s socio-emotional skills: Is there a quantity–quality trade-off?
Although it is widely acknowledged that non-cognitive skills matter for adult outcomes, little is known about the role played by family environment in the formation of these skills. We use a longitudinal survey of children born in the UK in 2000–2001, the Millennium Cohort Study by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, to estimate the effect … Read more
Inference for the neighbourhood inequality index
The neighborhood inequality (NI) index measures aspects of spatial inequality in the distribution of incomes within a city. It is a population average of the normalized income gap between each individual’s income (observed at a given location in the city) and the incomes of the neighbours located within a certain distance range. The approach overcomes … Read more