Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may Does School Tracking Affect Equality of Opportunity? New International Evidence Giorgio Brunello Daniele Checchi D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S MotivationThe quotes from eminent social scientists reported above well summarise the common opinion emerged after two decades of studies in the sociology of education. While initial studies focused mainly on secondary education, recent literature extends the analysis to school stratification at tertiary level (Arum, Gamoran and Shavit 2004). The key concept developed here is school stratification, considered as detrimental to educational achievement because it introduces fictitious barriers to further education.School stratification is viewed as a relevant institutional device reinforcing the intergenerational persistence in educational achievements across different social classes (Mare 1981).More recently, few papers in the economics of education have reinforce this view (see Hanushek and Wößmann 2006, Ammermüller 2005, Schuetz, Ursprung and Wößmann 2005. In their analysis, the age of first selection into tracking and/or the number of track options available to the students is found to reinforce the impact of family background, and increase the dispersion in student achievements. While the large part of the sociological literature uses representative samples of adult populations and typically investigates educational attainment, the economic literature mainly relies on samples of students from international surveys, which measure literacy and numeracy at relatively early ages (13 or 15).Our paper follow the line of research in the economics of education. We ask whether the effects of school design on inequality of opportunity are a temporary effect that can be detected when students are close to the tracking point or extend beyond that to the early part of adult working life.The question has relevance for policy, which is naturally more concerned about lasting effects.Therefore, we extend the analysis of the impact of school design on the role of parental privilege from 4 the classrooms to the labour market, because we believe that one acid test of the quality of human capital accumulated at school is labour market returns (see Card and Krueger, 1990).The empirical literature -see for instance the recent OECD PISA reports -has documented that one important reason of within country differences in educational attainment is family background.Since learning begets...

Using data from 12 European countries and the variation across countries and over time in the changes of minimum school leaving age, we study the effects of the quantity of education on the distribution of earnings. We find that compulsory school reforms significantly affect educational attainment, especially among individuals belonging to the lowest quantiles of the distribution of ability. There is also evidence that additional education reduces conditional wage inequality, and that education and ability are substitutes in the earnings function

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