Gabriele Ballarino

Field of Study and University Graduates' Early Employment Outcomes in Italy During 1995–2004

In a period of expanding higher education, the field of study becomes a key determinant of university graduates labour market success. In this paper, by means of multivariate analyses of the quality of graduates early employment outcomes, we first describe how the effect of different fields of study on the university-to-work transition changed between 1995 and 2004 in Italy. Second, we put forward some alternative hypotheses to interpret the changes observed over time and assess which ones seem to be more consistent with the data. Copyright 2009 CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Participation, equality of opportunity and returns to tertiary education in contemporary Europe

ABSTRACT The aim of the paper is to investigate the consequences of the expansion of higher education on two goals of the education system, namely promoting equity of educational opportunities and providing credentials that facilitate the matching of labour supply and demand. The first goal is typically studied by research on inequality of educational opportunity; the second by research on returns to education and credential inflation. The key idea of the paper is that educational expansion can have different and possibly opposite effects on the two goals. (a) If, with educational expansion, equality of educational opportunities increases, while the occupational value of the titles decreases, one has a trade-off scenario. For example, an increase in equality of educational opportunities is matched by a decline in the value of higher education in the labour market. (b) If equality of opportunities does not increase, despite the expansion of higher education, and the returns of higher education degrees decline, one has then a worst-off scenario. (c) Finally, if with educational expansion equality of opportunities increases and there is no credential inflation, one has a best-off scenario. In this paper, we systematically investigate these alternative scenarios. We perform the same empirical analysis on two distinct data sets in order to test the robustness of our findings. We use micro data from EU-SILC 2005 and from the five merged waves of the European Social Survey (2002–2010), covering 23 countries.

The occupational integration of migrant women in Western European labour markets

This paper studies the integration of migrant women in six European labour markets, highlighting how their migration penalty is related to the family’s migration dynamics and to the husband’s occupational condition. In order to compare the labour market outcomes of native and migrant women, Linear Probability Models are estimated using EU–LFS data. Results show that migrant women are penalized everywhere. However, in the Mediterranean labour markets their employment penalty is lower, while the penalty concerning job quality, conditional on employment, is relatively severe. Regarding the role of family migration, results show that: tied-movers women were disadvantaged with respect to both natives and other migrants; those migrants whose partners were unemployed or had low-quality jobs were more likely to find a job than those whose husbands had a good occupational condition. Both patterns were stronger in Mediterranean labour markets.

Social stratification, secondary school tracking and university enrolment in Italy

This paper looks at class inequality in the probability of enrolling in university in Italy from a long-term perspective. Given that Italian higher secondary education is tracked, it studies how tracking interacts over time with class origin in the production of inequality of educational opportunities, thus contributing to the growing literature on the inequality effects of the qualitative, or horizontal, stratification of educational systems. The paper has thus two research questions. First, it asks whether class inequality in participation in higher education has changed over time; second, whether and how this change was influenced by the tracked structure of upper secondary school. Empirical analyses are based on data from the Italian Longitudinal Household Survey, a retrospective panel survey including detailed life-course information about a representative sample of the Italian population. In an educational transition framework, we analyse the association between social class, tracking and university enrolment, applying the Karlson/Holm/Breen decomposition method for logistic regression coefficients. We find increasing inequality in accessing university, and a change in the role of upper secondary track, whose mediating role between family background and university choice appears to have weakened over time.

Education as the great equalizer: a theoretical framework

The quotations at the top of this page suggest that weapons, death and education make people equal. A king ultimately faces death as a beggar, an armed small person is equal to a large one, and an educated poor person can overcome the disadvantage and become rich. However, the tomb of a king is usually very different from that of a beggar, if the latter is so lucky as to be buried in one. Moreover, we also know that there are substantial differences in life expectancy between a beggar and a king. In Hamlet’s Denmark of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a king could expect to live for about 60 years,1 while the Danish average life expectancy at that time has been assessed at about 35 to 40 years (Johansen 2002).Without going to the extreme of the social hierarchy, still today in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries the gap in lifeexpectancy between adults with a tertiary education and those with below uppersecondary education is about eight years (OECD 2013). If we are all equal after death, some appear at least more able to delay it.

Espansione senza equalizzazione? Le disuguaglianze di accesso al dottorato di ricerca in Italia dagli anni ’90 in avanti

Di norma, l’espansione della partecipazione a un determinato livello del sistema educativo e associata a quella che i sociologi chiamano equalizzazione della partecipazione stessa, cioe a una diminuzione delle disuguaglianze ascritte (di origini sociali o etniche e genere) nella possibilita di accesso a questo livello scolastico. Questo lavoro si chiede se questo vale anche per il dottorato di ricerca in Italia, che tra la fine degli anni ’90 e la meta del decennio successivo ha conosciuto un’espansione molto forte. L’analisi di due dataset che comprendono questo periodo (AlmaLaurea 1999-2005; Istat laureati 1992-2004) mostra invece che in questo caso ne le disuguaglianze di genere ne quelle di classe sono significativamente cambiate.

Sociologia ed economia del mercato del lavoro

According to the recent discussion on the relationship between sociology and economics, labour market is an interesting and peculiar field: trespassing from one discipline to the other has been more frequent then in other fields. In this review we adress two questions: a) why is labour market a peculiar area, with many exchanges between sociologists and economists?; b) what are the specific contributions given by the sociologists to this field? We propose an analytical distinction of sociological and economic theories according to the object and level of the analysis. In this way we identify three groups of theories: the first one studies the individual outcomes on the labour market; the second focuses on the organization of work in the firm; the third studies the norms that regulate work at the overall level of the labour market and at the individual level.

Accesso ed esiti occupazionali a breve del dottorato di ricerca in Italia. Un’analisi dei dati Istat e Stella

Negli anni recenti il numero di dottori di ricerca e cresciuto molto. Si mostra che tale processo non ha ridotto le disuguaglianze sociali e di genere nell’accesso al dottorato; le evidenze empiriche portate supportano poi l’ipotesi di un eccesso di offerta di dottori di ricerca nel mercato accademico.

La valutazione dell’efficacia del "sistema delle doti" della Regione Lombardia: modelli statistici e criticità nella progettazione

Il contributo descrive e commenta un esercizio di valutazione svolto per conto della Regione Lombardia nel biennio 2009-2011. Oggetto della valutazione era una serie di programmi (le doti) rivolti all’inserimento occupazionale di categorie di soggetti variamente svantaggiati, che ricevono voucher con cui accedere a servizi per l’impiego forniti da operatori accreditati, sia pubblici che privati. Il fine della valutazione era la produzione di un ranking per la valutazione dell’efficacia del servizio dei vari operatori. L’articolo descrive in primo luogo i dati che sono stati resi disponibili al gruppo dei valutatori e, a partire da questi, una serie di criticita collegate al disegno del programma. Quindi vengono descritti i modelli statistici utilizzati: due versioni di un modello multilivello a effetti casuali e un modello di analisi della frontiera di efficienza (DEA). Infine, si spiega perche il ranking cosi costruito non e utilizzabile operativamente e cosa si puo fare per superare le criticita e ottenere una valutazione completa e soddisfacente di importanti politiche pubbliche analoghe a quella descritta in questo lavoro.