Thailand Law Journal 2009 Spring Issue 1 Volume 12

  Table 3. Means and Standard Deviations of the Main Variables, by Job, 2001. 

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                                Production Jobs              Other Jobs        

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Variable                      Mean       Std. Dev.       Mean       Std. Dev.  

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Observations                  1,140                       597                  

Wage                          8,915       (4,639)       16,023       (8,851)  

OJT Incidence                 0.65         (0.48)        0.57         (0.49)  

OFFJT Incidence            0.56         (0.49)        0.74         (0.44)  

OJT Intensity                   3.05         (7.17)        2.76         (6.88)  

OFFJT Intensity               0.85         (1.74)        1.73         (2.98)  

Cumulated OJT             10.91        (24.92)        9.89        (22.13)  

Cumulated OFFJT           3.56        (9.12)         7.13        (10.78)  

Years of Education        10.65        (3.00)        13.28        (2.87)  

Age                               27.46        (6.22)        29.52        (4.91)  

Tenure in 1998                2.52         (3.32)        3.94         (4.09)  

Previous Experience in     2.38         (3.68)        1.96         (3.47)  

  1998                                                                        

No. Siblings                     3.22         (2.23)        3.39         (2.21)  

Father's Education            0.19                          0.33                  

Mother's Education          0.09                          0.21                  

Oldest Sibling's                0.10                          0.33                  

  Education                                                                    

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  Notes: See notes to Table 2. "Other jobs" include team leaders, foremen, technicians, and engineers.

We conclude this section by discussing how years of education vary with family background, the number of siblings, and birth order.[FN12] Respondents had an average of 11.56 years of schooling. This average falls to 11.29 if the father had at most primary education and increases to 12.55 if the father had higher education. A similar range becomes apparent when we focus on the mother's education. The relationship between birth-order position in the household and years of education varies with gender.

The percentage of men aged between 21 and 30 with at least 12 years of education is 66.8% for the oldest son in the household, 60% for the youngest son, and 54.5% for those in intermediate position. The corresponding percentages for women in the sample are dramatically lower, at 21%, 24.9%, and 15.7%, respectively.

Table 4 shows how the distribution of educational attainment varies with the number of siblings. It is clear that the percentage of individuals with low educational attainment is substantially higher when the number of siblings is larger, probably because of stronger competition for household resources in those circumstances. [FN13]

[FN12]. The importance of family background for education in East Asian countries is discussed by Woessmann (2003).

[FN13]. A larger number of siblings can also reflect heterogeneous preferences across parents regarding child quality and quantity within the standard quality-quantity fertility models.

This article is published with the kind permission of Kenn Ariga and Giorgio Brunello. The article originally appeared in Volume 59, Issue 4, July 2006, of the Industrial and Labor Relations Review. Copyright Cornell University.