Primary Submission Category: Applicants in Social Sciences
Assessing the Causal Impact of Early Tracking Postponement on Inequality of Opportunity: Evidence from the Italian Single Middle School Reform
Authors: Kevin Taglialatela Scafati, Paolo Brunori, Fabrizia Mealli,
Presenting Author: Kevin Taglialatela Scafati*
Over the past two decades a growing body of empirical research has sought to evaluate the causal impact of school tracking on inequality. This paper contributes to this literature by exploiting the case of the 1963 Italian Single Middle School reform to investigate the causal effect of an early tracking postponement on inequality of opportunity (IOp). Our primary outcome of interest is a long-term well-being measure, namely an estimate of the individual permanent income. By exploiting the reform’s innovations and their implementation timeline, we identify two groups of students that are exposed to educational systems that differ solely due to the presence of early tracking. We assume these groups overlap in terms of key observed ascribed characteristics – such as birthplace, parental education and occupation, sex – which serve as potential sources of inequality and confounding. Building on established social science literature, we employ inequality indices (e.g., Gini, MLD) applied to predicted individual well-being based on ascribed factors as measures of IOp. Our primary estimands contrast these measures across the two selected exposure groups, providing insights into the causal effect of interest. The nature of these novel estimands presents challenges for estimation; we adopt a Bayesian approach to inference which allows to naturally quantify the uncertainty of the targeted quantities and to flexibly specify the outcome model through a non-parametric BART specification.