Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may Does School Tracking Affect Equality of Opportunity? New International Evidence Giorgio Brunello Daniele Checchi D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S MotivationThe quotes from eminent social scientists reported above well summarise the common opinion emerged after two decades of studies in the sociology of education. While initial studies focused mainly on secondary education, recent literature extends the analysis to school stratification at tertiary level (Arum, Gamoran and Shavit 2004). The key concept developed here is school stratification, considered as detrimental to educational achievement because it introduces fictitious barriers to further education.School stratification is viewed as a relevant institutional device reinforcing the intergenerational persistence in educational achievements across different social classes (Mare 1981).More recently, few papers in the economics of education have reinforce this view (see Hanushek and Wößmann 2006, Ammermüller 2005, Schuetz, Ursprung and Wößmann 2005. In their analysis, the age of first selection into tracking and/or the number of track options available to the students is found to reinforce the impact of family background, and increase the dispersion in student achievements. While the large part of the sociological literature uses representative samples of adult populations and typically investigates educational attainment, the economic literature mainly relies on samples of students from international surveys, which measure literacy and numeracy at relatively early ages (13 or 15).Our paper follow the line of research in the economics of education. We ask whether the effects of school design on inequality of opportunity are a temporary effect that can be detected when students are close to the tracking point or extend beyond that to the early part of adult working life.The question has relevance for policy, which is naturally more concerned about lasting effects.Therefore, we extend the analysis of the impact of school design on the role of parental privilege from 4 the classrooms to the labour market, because we believe that one acid test of the quality of human capital accumulated at school is labour market returns (see Card and Krueger, 1990).The empirical literature -see for instance the recent OECD PISA reports -has documented that one important reason of within country differences in educational attainment is family background.Since learning begets...

Inequality of opportunity, Income inequality, Intergenerational mobility,

Using annual data on aggregate union membership and density in fourteen European countries, the authors examine the short-term and long-term determinants of the postwar pattern of union growth and decline in Western Europe since 1950. In an attempt to explain the observed convergence in trends and persistence in cross-national differences, most research has applied either business cycle models, using longitudinal data, or concentrated on political, structural or institutional factors, using cross-sectoral samples. Using a pooled (time-series-cross-section) regression, in error-corrected form, the authors build and test an explanatory model that incorporates structural, cyclical and institutional determinants of union decline, and allows a distinction between short-term and long-term effects. The results suggest that the convergent trend to union decline during the 1980s and 1990s is entirely endogenous to labour market changes, the impact of which is mediated by a specific and limited set of labour market institutions.

A large literature has studied the impact of labour market institutions on wage inequality, but their effect on income inequality has received little attention. In this paper we argue that personal income inequality is a function of the wage differential, the labour share, and the unemployment rate. Labour market institutions then affect income inequality through these three channels and their overall effect is theoretically ambiguous. We use a panel of OECD countries for the period 1960-2000 to examine these effects. We find that greater unionization and a higher degree of wage bargaining coordination have opposite effects on inequality, implying conflicting effects of greater union presence on the distribution of income.

We study the evolution of union density in 14 European countries over the postwar period in light of theoretical rationales for union membership. Unions offer not only wage bargaining strength, but also protection against uninsurable labour market risks, and similar protection may also be offered by labour market institutions. Empirically, such institutions as job security legislation and wage indexation do appear to crowd out unions. Conversely, institutional features that make it easier for unions to function (such as workplace representation and centralized wage bargaining) are empirically associated with higher unionization. Copyright (c) CEPR, CES, MSH, 2002.

In this paper we suggest a simple decomposition of the correlation coefficient of education to account for different intergenerational mobility of subgroups of the population, which is of key importance from a policy persepective.Focussing on the interesting Italian case, we show that the high persistence of educational attainment found in the data is due to a much larger probability of obtaining a college degree of children of highly educated fathers.

Abstract:The recent debate on trends in inequality in industrial countries has been marred by the lack of consensus about the relevant concept of inequality. Labour economists are concerned with inequality in earnings, macroeconomists with movements in the wage share, while policy-makers tend to focus on household income inequality. We provide a unifying framework to study the relationship between these three concepts of inequality and their correlation with labour market institutions. Institutional measures exhibit significant associations with inequality, yet they play different roles depending on the extent to which they complement or substitute each other. As a result, we are able to propose a set of inequality minimizing institutions. Institutions that decrease inequality are, however, associated with higher unemployment, and our analysis explores the magnitude of this trade-off, and its implications if a common labour standard is imposed on members of the European Union. JEL classification numbers: D31 (Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions) -D33 (Factor Income Distribution)

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