published in: L. Woessmann and P. Petersen (eds.), Schools and the Equal Opportunity Problem, MIT 2007, 129-156
We develop a simple model which determines the optimal timing of school tracking as the
outcome of the trade off between the advantages of specialization, which call for early
tracking, and the costs of early selection, which lead to later tracking. We calibrate the model
for Germany and study how relative demand shifts toward more general skills and changes in
the (exogenous) rate of technical progress affect the optimal tracking time as well as the
efficient allocation of students to general and vocational tracks.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.