Search Results

Title: Using the Two-Sided Logit Model to Elucidate the Determinants of Occupational Attainment
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Wells, Thomas Eric
Using the Two-Sided Logit Model to Elucidate the Determinants of Occupational Attainment
Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2000. DAI 61,12A (2000): 4958
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning
Keyword(s): Cognitive Ability; Demography; Educational Attainment; Ethnic Studies; Family Background and Culture; Industrial Relations; Modeling, Logit; Racial Studies; Socioeconomic Background; Work Experience

This research project addresses the labor market process of matching people to jobs. Using John Allen Logan's two-sided logit model along with recent data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I investigate the process by which workers get matched to jobs, paying attention to characteristics and preferences of both workers and employers.

The results from my analysis indicate that race/ethnicity, cognitive ability, educational attainment, and years of work experience are all salient factors in predicting the likelihood of receiving employment offers. In addition, the results indicate that hourly rate of pay is a salient factor in predicting the likelihood of accepting an employment offer in a particular occupational category.

However, the coefficients corresponding to the preferences of employers for characteristics of individuals are not shown to be uniform across the occupational distribution. Rather, they are shown to differ across the occupational categories, suggesting the existence of differential employer preferences and differential demands for certain types of labor across the occupational structure. Such findings and interpretations are consistent with common sense and are hardly surprising. However, status attainment and earnings attainment models are usually constructed in such a way that a single uniform labor market process is implicitly assumed to operate across the entire occupational structure. The results indicate that this is not the case.

I also consider the role that family background variables may play in predicting the likelihood of receiving offers of employment in various occupational categories. However, these variables are not shown to provide much additional explanatory power in terms of predicting occupational outcomes.

My findings seem to indicate that employers are primarily concerned with the characteristics of individuals. An individual's socioeconomic background is not extremely relevant to employersand to their hiring decisions, ostensibly because (unlike cognitive ability, educational attainment, and work experience) it has little bearing on an individual's capacity to perform a job. However, this is not to say that socioeconomic origins have no bearing on occupational outcomes. My findings also suggest that background variables may exert important indirect effects through the other variables included in the model.

Bibliography Citation
Wells, Thomas Eric. Using the Two-Sided Logit Model to Elucidate the Determinants of Occupational Attainment. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2000. DAI 61,12A (2000): 4958.