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Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics
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The effect of parental background on track choices and wages

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics volume 147, pages 157–180 (2011)Cite this article

Summary

Intergenerational links are often investigated by computing educational attainment correlations between parents and children, even though parental background may influence outcomes at earlier stages of the educational path. Because of early school track selection and widespread vocational training, this effect may be quite important in the Swiss context. We first investigate the importance of parental background variables for upper secondary educational attainment over the last 6 decades. We next estimate the impact of parental background on earnings. This effect is shown to depend on the magnitude of intergenerational correlations, the returns to qualifications and the availability of further training for those having ended up in a low educational track at age 15. The impact of tracking at age 15 on wage inequality is found to be relatively small in Switzerland, comparing to results for Germany. Relatively low returns from academic education best explain this pattern.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Leading House in the economics of vocational education, 40 Bd. du Pont-d’Arve, 1211, Geneva 4, Switzerland

    Jean-Marc Falter, Giovanni Ferro Luzzi & Federica Sbergami

Authors
  1. Jean-Marc Falter
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  2. Giovanni Ferro Luzzi
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  3. Federica Sbergami
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Giovanni Ferro Luzzi or Federica Sbergami.

Additional information

This research was supported by the Swiss Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology (OPET). This study has been realized using the data collected by the Swiss Household Panel, Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (Fors), a project financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation Programm. We wish to thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments. We also benefited from comments by participants at the annual meeting of the European Association of Labour Economists in September 2008, by attendants of the “International Conference of Panel Data Users” in Lausanne in June 2009, by participants of the research seminar of the University of Fribourg. Any remaining errors are the authors’.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Falter, JM., Luzzi, G.F. & Sbergami, F. The effect of parental background on track choices and wages. Swiss J Economics Statistics 147, 157–180 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399344

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