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On the explanation of schooling, occupation and earnings: Some alternative path analyses

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Summary

Jencks's well-known sociological path analysis connecting parental socio-economic characteristics and some ability measure of the person investigated with his or her schooling, occupation and income is available for the United States, Sweden and the Netherlands in various versions. For the United Kingdom the analysis has now been applied to the new General Household Survey, supplying over 5000 observations. This article compares the various results and offers a few alternative models, using the American and British data. These alternatives do not offer, in the British case, improvements in variance explained. Moreover, most regression coefficients show wide variations between countries. A suggestion for improvement is derived from a recent study using at least three occupation characteristics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. London School of Economics and Erasmus University, Rotterdam

    Jan Tinbergen

Authors
  1. George Psacharopoulos
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  2. Jan Tinbergen
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Additional information

We are grateful to the British Office of Population Census and Surveys for making available to us the data from which the UK results reported in this article were obtained.

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Psacharopoulos, G., Tinbergen, J. On the explanation of schooling, occupation and earnings: Some alternative path analyses. De Economist 126, 505–520 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01849812

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01849812

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