Moving beyond mean differences: The role of educational achievement and labor market inequality

Educational systems can typically be characterized according to two fundamental features: stratification and standardization. While "standardization" refers to the extent to which nationwide criteria for educational standards exist, "stratification" describes the extent to which the educational system is hierarchically stratified (i.e., the degree to which educational systems are tracked). The German educational system is a classic example of high standardization coupled with high levels of stratification whereas the educational system of the United States represents the prototypical case of low standardization and low stratification. It has been argued that educational systems with a stronger focus on stratification or tracking manage to more effectively educate pupils, however at the cost of exacerbating social inequality in children's educational achievement. Based on cross-national comparative data, the focus of this project is to reinvestigate the “equality-efficiency-trade-off” with respect to ethnic educational inequality and potential long-term effects of educational systems on labor market outcomes using a variance function regression framework. This approach is ideally suited to tackle research questions involving hypotheses about distributional differences (i.e., means and variances combined) of two (or more) groups.

DFG