This paper looks at how the Israeli system of sorting children into one of five programmes for their upper secondary school education affects their higher education attainment and earning prospects in their early thirties. The research is set in the context of three major programmes of education reform that have taken place in Israel since … Read more
Tracking in Israeli high schools: social inequality after 50 years of educational reforms
Upper secondary school tracking, labour market outcomes and intergenerational inequality in Denmark
This paper is a comprehensive analysis of how secondary school education of Danish children affects their early job and earning prospects. Using administrative data on more than 50,000 children born in Denmark in 1986, the researchers looked at whether young people were placed on an academic or vocational track at school and the sort of … Read more
Educational tracking and long-term outcomes by social origin: Seven countries in comparison
This paper uses longitudinal data from seven countries to assess how systems of educational tracking can impact on social mobility. Studies which simply compare comprehensive and tracked systems may be flawed, the research suggests, because of differences in how countries separate students for instructional purposes. The researchers used large-scale longitudinal data from Denmark, England, Finland, … Read more
Compensatory and multiplicative advantages: Social origin, school performance, and stratified higher education enrolment in Finland
This research finds that even in Finland, enrolling in higher education depends on students’ school performance and their parents’ education. The study uses register data from Finland, where students take entrance exams for higher education and where the education system involves both universities and polytechnics, to look at how social origin and school performance is … Read more
Intergenerational mobility, intergenerational effects, sibling correlations, and equality of opportunity: A comparison of four approaches
This paper compares four different ways of researching how family background affects our educational attainment and earnings: looking at intergenerational mobility; looking at how interventions with parents can affect offspring – the ‘intergenerational effects’ approach – looking at what share of inequality is shared by siblings – ‘sibling correlations’ – and looking for factors which … Read more
Inequality of socio-emotional skills: a cross-cohort comparison
This paper shows that inequality in a crucial dimension of human capital – socio-emotional skills at age five – increased dramatically between two cohorts of British children born in 1970 and 2000. The authors used data from the British Cohort Study and the Millennium Cohort Study, which followed two cohorts of children born in 1970 … Read more
COVID‐19 and Inequalities
This paper brings together evidence from various data sources and the most recent studies to describe what we know so far about the impacts of the COVID‐19 crisis on inequalities across several key domains of life, including employment and ability to earn, family life and health. We show how these new fissures interact with existing … Read more
Sources of change in the primary and secondary effects of social class origin on educational decisions: evidence from Denmark, 2002–2016
It is well-known that pupils from poorer backgrounds are more likely than their peers to take vocational rather than academic routes in upper secondary school – but what drives this? Does social class status itself lead to these decisions, or is there a mediating factor at play: that pupils from less well-off homes tend to … Read more
Inequality of socio-emotional skills: a cross-cohort comparison
This paper shows that inequality in a crucial dimension of human capital – socio-emotional skills at age five – increased dramatically between two cohorts of British children born in 1970 and 2000. The authors used data from the British Cohort Study and the Millennium Cohort Study, which followed two cohorts of children born in 1970 … Read more
Family Background, Educational Qualifications and Meritocratic Labor Market Allocation: Evidence from Danish Siblings
This paper looks at how education and family background shapes the occupation and earnings of a generation of Danes, and concludes that education plays a powerful role in explaining why children from advantaged backgrounds have higher earnings than chil-dren from disadvantaged backgrounds. The researchers studied all children born in Denmark between 1965 and 1971 and … Read more