The aim of the paper is to characterize the factors that determine the transition from university to work as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of universities and course programmes with respect to the labour market outcomes of their graduates. The study is focused on the analysis of the time to obtain the ®rst job, taking into account the graduates' characteristics and the effects pertaining to course programmes and universities. For this a three-level discrete time survival model is used, where the logit of the hazard Ð conditionally on the random effects at course programme and university level Ð is a linear function of the covariates. The analysis is accomplished by using a large data set from a survey on job opportunities for the 1992 Italian graduates.
This article tackles several issues involved in specifying, fitting, and interpreting the results of multilevel factor models for ordinal variables. First, the problem of model specification and identification is addressed, outlining parameter interpretation. Special attention is devoted to the consequences on interpretation stemming from the usual choice of not decomposing the specificities into hierarchical components. Then a general strategy of analysis is outlined, highlighting the role of the exploratory steps. The theoretical topics are illustrated through an application to graduates' job satisfaction, where estimation is based on maximum likelihood via an Expectation-Maximization algorithm with adaptive quadrature.
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