The Optimal Timing of School Tracking

Center-Right Parties and Post-War Secondary Education

“…Lower-secondary education (ages [12][13][14][15][16] was largely stratified and unstandardized, meaning that the children of the emerging middle and working classes often lacked onward opportunities. 11 Figure 1, which draws on extensive original data collection of policy reform (see Appendix 1) shows that in 1945, formal stratification through early streaming was nearly universal.…”

“…Political economists, by contrast, largely theorize the politics of streaming through the lens of skill creation, linking early streaming to specialized vocational training. 16 Work on the evolution of skill formation argues that 19 th -century European institutions led to the development of firms built around more specialized production relying on high-quality specialized vocational (apprenticeship) training. 17 In this perspective, the educational stance of center-right actors is largely endogenous to the cross-class coalition institutionalized in labor market structures.…”

The Stairways to Heaven: A Model of Career Choice in Sports and Games, with an Application to Chess

“…Chess also shares with many sports and games the tiny probability of becoming a star and earning money: in October 2006 there were only 20 players with an ELO score higher than or equal to 2700 in the international list of close to 50 thousand players with an official rating, and only close to 1 percent of the list had attained the 2500 threshold. Another advantage is that, compared to other individual sports 3 , chess is truly an international game, with more than 60 countries represented in the international list of rated players published by the International Chess Federation (F IDE). Interesting cross -country variation is present.…”

“…These solutions are inputs to maximum likelihood estimation based on the observed realizations of individual choice. We maximize the likelihood with respect to three key parameters of the model, the cost of training, the probability of success and the variance of the noise in the sequential screening process 3. We do not use more popular professional sports with richer and readily available data such as baseball, soccer, hockey, etc., primarily because individual performance is more difficult to measure in these team sports and games 4.…”