Arbeitspapier

Does Money Buy Higher Schooling? Evidence from Secondary School Track Choice in Germany

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.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: RWI Discussion Papers ; No. 55

Classification
Wirtschaft
Analysis of Education
Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
Subject
Child poverty
educational attainment
secondary schools
sibling differences
natural experiment
Bildungsniveau
Bildungsverhalten
Allgemeinbildende Schule
Eltern
Einkommen
Armut
Deutschland

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Tamm, Marcus
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (RWI)
(where)
Essen
(when)
2007

Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET

Data provider

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Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Tamm, Marcus
  • Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (RWI)

Time of origin

  • 2007

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