Educational Systems and the Trade-Off between Labour Market Allocation and Equality of Educational Opportunity. A replication of Bol and van de Werfhorst (2013)

Bol and van de Werfhorst’s article published in 2013 represents a milestone for researchers studying the effect of educational institutions on micro-level outcomes. In the above-mentioned article, tracking and other concepts, like vocational enrolment and vocational specificity, have been operationalized into numerical indicators and then used in regression models in order to establish their associations with individual outcomes. This article points out that Bol and van de Werfhorst’s analyses contain two errors. First, their model specifications disregard the role played by a confounder i.e., political orientation of policy makers. Second, their analytical strategy does not adequately correct for the fact that the dependent variables are estimated. I replicate their analyses regarding social inequality of educational attainment (OE) and educational gradient in occupational attainment (ED) correcting for both errors. These new findings do not support the existence of a trade-off between labour market allocation and equality of educational opportunity when it comes to educational and occupational attainment.