The German schooling system selects children into different secondary school tracks already at a very early stage in life. School track choice heavily influences choices and opportunities later in life. It has often been observed that secondary schooling achievements display a strong correlation with parental income. We use sibling fixed effects models and information on a natural experiment in order to analyze whether this correlation is due to a causal effect of income or due to unobservable factors that themselves might be correlated across generations. Our main findings suggest that income has no positive causal effect on school choice and that differences between high- and low-income households are driven by unobserved heterogeneity, e.g. differences in motivation or preferences.
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Paper provided by DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) in its series SOEPpapers with number
41.
Length: 19 p. Date of creation: 2007 Date of revision: Publication status: Published in: Economics of Education Review 27 (2008) 5, 536-545 Handle: RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp41
Find related papers by JEL classification: D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Gary S. Becker & Nigel Tomes, 1994.
"X. Human Capital and the Rise and Fall of Families,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (3rd Edition), pages 257-298
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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