Transitions dans le parcours de vie et construction des inégalités

Tout au long de leur existence, les individus suivent des chemins singuliers dont les trajectoires ne sont pas le simple fait de la seule volonté ou du hasard. Ces cheminements se révèlent souvent générateurs d'inégalités entre individus, notamment au cours des transitions des âges de la vie (enfance, adolescence, âge adulte, grand âge), ou lors de différentes étapes (mariage, divorce, deuil, etc). C'est afin de mieux comprendre les modalités et les combinaisons d'influence à l'origine des inégalités dans les parcours de vie, que les éditeurs de cet ouvrage ont réuni des chercheurs issus des sciences psychologiques, sociales et économiques, afin de croiser leurs regards sur la manière dont ces inégalités se creusent ou se réduisent au fil des trajectoires. Cet ouvrage interdisciplinaire met en relief la richesse d'une approche des inégalités dans la perspective dynamique du parcours de vie.Peer reviewe

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Origine sociale, transitions vers la formation secondaire supérieure et inégalités de formation en Suisse

Auf Grund der frühen Selektion der Schüler dürfte der Übergang zur Sekundarstufe II eine starke Wirkung auf die Bildungsungleichheit in der Schweiz haben. Dieser Befund wird durch vorhandene Brücken zur tertiären Bildung relativiert. Wir verwenden die TREE-Daten, eine Längsschnittstudie, welche die Entwicklung von Personen verfolgt, die an der PISA-Erhebung 2000 teilgenommen haben. Dank dieser Daten verfügen wir über Informationen zu Ausbildungsverlauf (Übergänge), Kompetenzentwicklung und familiärem Umfeld. Wir benutzen ein sequentielles Modell, welches die Bildungsungleichheit zerlegt und nach der Bedeutung der verschiedenen Übergänge gewichtet. Es wird aufgezeigt, dass die Auswirkungen von Übergängen zwischen Bildungsstufen auf die Ungleichheit stark von individuellen Fähigkeiten und dem Geschlecht abhängen.Abstract: Transitions to upper secondary education may shape inequalities in Switzerland, which is characterized by early tracking and an extensive vocational track. Yet, pathways inside the schooling system may lower the impact of schooling decisions taking place at age 15. We use micro-data from TREE, a follow-up of the Swiss sample of PISA 2000, where upper secondary school choices can be observed together with cognitive ability and fam-ily background variables. We estimate a sequential model, which allows breaking down educational outcomes between inequality of opportunities at various transitions inside and the weights of these transitions. We show that the importance of educational transitions heavily depends on ability and gender 6 Conclusion In this paper, we investigate intergenerational mobility with respect to educational attainment in Switzerland. We make use of data from TREE, a follow-up of PISA 2000, which combines information on ability at age 15 and longitudinal information. Our goal is to analyze the cumulative feature of education as we estimate a sequential logit model. We are particulatly interested in transitions leading to the vocational matura, as this new qualification may provide new opportunities for individuals following the vocational track. Subsequently, we endeavor to measure whether inequality of educational opportunities measured at various transitions points implies inequality of educational outcomes. Our results show that parental background variables matter for most transitions. This is especially true with respect to the ttansition towatds the vocational matura, which takes place approximately at age 19 or later. Our results also point to important gender effects. Parental education and reading test score coefficients ate positively correlated with choosing the vocational matura for men, while the reverse is true for women. This could be explained by the fact that VET is relatively less attractive for women, due to the type of occupations in which this type of training takes place. When we turn to the link between these intergenerational correlations and inequality of educational outcomes, our results show that the effects of parental background heavily depend on the skill level of individuals. Inequality of outcomes is a weighted mean of inequality of opportunities. The weights depend on the population facing transition, the expected gains and the variance of passing a transition. For low ability students, parental background variables have an impact on inequality of outcomes only with respect to dropping out of school. This is explained by the fact that low ability students are quite unlikely to face transitions towards higher education. Parental background variables also have limited impacts on high ability children as they are sorted into higher forms of education, independently of their social characteristics. With respect to transitions to vocational matura, our results show that parental education increases the probability of pursuing education for both women and men. Yet, it only has an impact on the inequality of educational outcomes for the latter as the weight of this transition is small for women.Du fait de la sélection précoce des élèves, les transitions vers la formation secondaire supérieure sont susceptibles d’avoir un fort effet sur les inégalités de formation en Suisse. Ce constat est pondéré par l’existence de passerelles vers la formation tertiaire. Nous utilisons les données de TREE qui est un suivi longitudinal de personnes ayant participé à PISA 2000. Ainsi, nous disposons d’informations sur les transitions scolaires, les compétences des élèves et leur milieu familial. Nous estimons un modèle séquentiel, qui nous permet de décomposer les inégalités scolaires selon l’importance des différentes transitions. Nous montrons que l’impact d’une transition sur les inégalités de formation dépend fortement des capacités des individus ainsi que du genre

Age of Tracking and Educational Choices: New Evidences from Switzerland

Many studies have investigated the impact of the age of tracking on educational outcomes. Evidences show that intergenerational correlation in educational attainment are stronger when the timing of school tracking takes place relatively early. We analyze the impact of the age of tracking with the help of a unique dataset, TREE, which is a longitudinal follow-up of individuals first surveyed in PISA 2000. Thus, we contribute to the literature by disentangling between ability effects and parental background effects. Our results show that early tracking indeed seems to to have an impact on the magnitude of intergenerational links. Yet, the results heavily depend on the level of measured ability as well as on the type of education considered

Equivalence Scales and Subjective Data in Switzerland

The estimation of equivalence scales is an important aspect of any poverty or inequality analysis. Most of the research and policy recommendations rely on so called expert scales. Some of them are used in many countries, like the OECD scale. In Switzerland, recommendations of the CSIAS, the main body in charge of social norms, are followed by academics as well as practitioners. Yet, the use of such equivalence scales should be validated by statistical results on the cost of children. To the author knowledge, all avalaible studies on equivalence scales in Switzerland are based on demand behavior, a method with its own merits and shortcomings. We claim that subjective estimators may overcome the difficulties implied by traditional estimation of equivalence scales. Our results seem to indicate that the expert scales are too steep. However, our results are driven by the choice of the research instrument.Equivalence scales; poverty analysis; subjective data

Self-Employment and Wage Discrimination in Switzerland

This paper investigates the determinants of self-employment in Switzerland, focusing on the differences between groups that are discriminated against on the wage-job market groups that are treated fairly. The main hypothesis is that members of discriminated against groups may go into entrepreneurship or self-employment in order to avoid the income penalty they face. We test the self-employment model with the help of a switching regression model for various groups in order to find out whether the selection process into self-employment is the same for discriminated against or fairly treated individuals. Our results show that foreigners are not negatively selected towards wage-work which challenges the existence of a "push" effect due to wage discrimination. In the mean time, women show a completely different selection process into wage-work and self-employment than men. However, we cannot conclude that discrimination pushes women into self-employment. Finally, we also examine whether differences in the rate of self-employment between groups can be explained by different characteristics endowments or by different determinants by carrying out a probability decomposition in a probit model framework.

Der soziale Status determiniert die Bildungschancen

Die Berufsmatur ermöglicht jungen Menschen aus benachteiligten Milieus den Zugang zu tertiären Bildungsangeboten. Doch sie hat nur wenig Einfluss auf die soziale Mobilität. In modernen Gesellschaften ist Bildung der wichtigste Einflussfaktor für sozioökonomischen Erfolg und daher auch immer Ausgangspunkt für Ungleichheit. Besonders bei den Übergängen während der Ausbildungszeit kommen die unterschiedlichen Ausgangsbedingungen zum Tragen. Oft beeinflusst die getroffene Entscheidung den gesamten weiteren Lebenslauf. Infolgedessen erscheint es sinnvoll, das Thema unter dem Aspekt der sozialen Reproduktion zu betrachten, die unter anderem durch Chancenungleichheit entsteht. Inwieweit ist die elterliche Bildung ausschlaggebend für den schulischen Erfolg der Kinder? Die Tatsache, dass sich Menschen aus sozioökonomisch schlechter gestellten Milieus häufiger für die Berufsmatur entscheiden als solche, die eine Gymnasialmatur erlangen, liefert einen Teil der Antwort. Es sollte also die Frage gestellt werden, ob die Berufsmatur zur Auflösung der generationenübergreifenden Bindungen beitragen und damit soziale Mobilität fördern könnte

Demand for football and intramatch winning probability: an essay on the glorious uncertainty of sports

The aims of this study are (i) to identify the main determinants of the demand for French Premiere Division football matches using all matches played during the 1997/1998 season, (ii) to estimate a team-specific probability of success, and (iii) to propose an updating process for the intramatch winning probability. The methodology is tested empirically over an out-of-sample data set using matches of the 1998/1999 season. The results show that football appears to be an inferior product affected by both socio-economic and football variables, and that the main football variables have only a tenuous explanatory power concerning the final outcome of a given match.