ans who take the issue of segregation from one of being unfair to being bad economic policy for cities, regions, states, and the United States as a whole. They are right. But many of you will also recall Nobel Laureate Gary Becker who argued that in the long run it does not pay to discriminate. Where did that get us? Each chapter contains important policy recommendations. This is particularly emphasized in a chapter by Greg Squires on fair housing enforcement as well as the editors’ closing remarks on attaining a just society. Segregation is the essential synthesis of what we need to know to move this issue forward. That will not be enough but it is what we have. Read it and use it.

Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study

Mental health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: a latent class trajectory analysis using longitudinal UK data.

This paper investigates the short-term effects of a reduction in the length of high school on students’ personality traits using a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment. Starting in 2001, academic-track high school (Gymnasium) was reduced from nine to eight years in most of Germany’s federal states, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. This enabled students to obtain a university entrance qualification (Abitur) after a total of only 12 rather than 13 years of schooling. We exploit the variation in the length of academic-track high school over time and across states to identify the effect of schooling on students’ Big Five personality traits and on their locus of control. Using rich data on adolescents and young adults from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study, our estimates show that shortening high school caused students on average to be more extroverted and less emotionally stable. Our estimates point to important heterogeneous effects. In addition to differences between East and West Germany, we find that male students and students from disrupted families showed stronger personality changes following the reform: they became more agreeable and more extroverted, respectively. We conclude that the educational system plays an important role in shaping adolescents’ personality traits.

ABSTRACT The Impact of Education on Personality: Evidence from a German High School Reform *

With the broader availability of panel data, fixed effects (FE) regression models are becoming increasingly important in sociology. However, in some studies the potential pitfalls of these models may be ignored, and common critiques of FE models may not always be applicable in comparison to other methods. This article provides an overview of linear FE models and their pitfalls for applied researchers. Throughout the article, we contrast FE and classical pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) models. We argue that in most cases FE models are at least as good as pooled OLS models. Therefore, we encourage scholars to use FE models if possible. Nevertheless, the limitations of FE models should be known and considered.

/pdf/let-s-talk-about-fixed-effects-let-s-talk-about-all-the-good-1ik8wd043w.pdf

Let’s Talk About Fixed Effects: Let’s Talk About All the Good Things and the Bad Things

School tracking has been introduced as a means to provide skills the labor market demands, and as such has been in place for several decades in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The time is thus ripe for a critical review of the effects this has had on the equalities in education and opportunities later in life, and on the quality of vocational education in general. A synthesis of the existing literature reveals gaping holes between the dreams of superior vocational education and training that educational tracking ought to deliver, and the realities of lost opportunities and facilitated inequalities, especially in students with poor socioeconomic background, weak social capital, and sparse social networks. This is all the more true the sooner educational tracking comes into effect. While most OECD countries will start tracking students aged 15 or 16, some countries, such as Germany, will start doing this as early as age 10. Our review shows that this can have catastrophic consequences for students that for various reasons perform poorly early on, as they are indeed unable to recover due to the Matthew effect and preferential attachment in social networks, both of which punish false starts in life and reward first movers. To remedy the situation, we propose educational tracking be held off until later in life, and even then be undertaken with flexibility and late bloomers in mind. We also propose to restructure vocational education by decreasing the degree of curriculum differentiation, by allowing broader vocational education curricula, and by decreasing the number of training occupations in order to account for the changing labor market dynamics.

/pdf/dreams-and-realities-of-school-tracking-and-vocational-21x7jej9ce.pdf

Dreams and realities of school tracking and vocational education

What explains the negative effect of unemployment on health? An analysis accounting for reverse causality

Data Resource Profile: Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security (PASS) Mark Trappmann,* Sebastian Bähr, Jonas Beste, Andreas Eberl, Corinna Frodermann, Stefanie Gundert, Stefan Schwarz, Nils Teichler, Stefanie Unger and Claudia Wenzig Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security, Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany, Faculty for Social Sciences, Economics, and Business Administration, University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany and University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Institute of Labor Market and Socioeconomics, Nuremberg, Germany

Data Resource Profile: Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security (PASS).

The degree of social reproduction varies considerably between industrialized countries, raising the question of which institutional regulations promote or restrict this process. Education is considered the main mediator of social reproduction. Because school tracking - the sorting of children according to ability and interest at different ages - is known to affect educational attainment and the degree of tracking varies strongly across countries, it may thus account for differences in social reproduction. However, empirical studies are scarce, and the total impact of tracking on social reproduction remains ambiguous. Using the European Social Survey (ESS) 2012 and 2014 from 24 countries, we demonstrate that school tracking is strongly associated with higher degrees of social reproduction. Decomposing the process of social reproduction into educational inheritance, educational returns and direct effects of social origin, we find that although all channels contribute to social reproduction, the impact of tracking seems to be exerted through educational inheritance and to a similar degree through direct effects of social origin, whereas educational returns do not seem to be affected. Even net of educational attainment, social origin thus has a stronger effect on social status in tracked systems. We ascribe this effect to differences in qualitative choices within educational tracks, such as fields of study.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1468-4446.12655

School tracking and its role in social reproduction: reinforcing educational inheritance and the direct effects of social origin

Despite a long record of research on the sources of the gender wage gap, a large fraction of gender wage differences remains unexplained. In this paper, we propose gender differences in social capital as a novel explanation for the gender wage gap. We use British data from the Understanding Society (UKHLS) survey and wage decompositions to estimate the contribution of social capital derived from network homophily, that is, the similarity to one's peer group, to the gender wage differential. Our results show that differences in network structure explain as much as 15% of the overall gender wage gap. This finding is largely driven by gender differences in the number of males among closest friends, while other social capital measures used in this study hardly matter. We further show that differences in returns to social capital are not statistically significant.

/pdf/social-capital-as-a-partial-explanation-for-gender-wage-gaps-4xldgaltix.pdf

Andreas Eberl

Papers

Let’s Talk About Fixed Effects: Let’s Talk About All the Good Things and the Bad Things

What explains the negative effect of unemployment on health? An analysis accounting for reverse causality

Data Resource Profile: Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security (PASS).

School tracking and its role in social reproduction: reinforcing educational inheritance and the direct effects of social origin

Social capital as a partial explanation for gender wage gaps.