Some are observed, all leave traces: whole-population modeling of French elite civil servants' career paths

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Voldoire, Théo, Ryder, Robin J., Lahfa, Ryan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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_version_ 1866914157272498176
author Voldoire, Théo
Ryder, Robin J.
Lahfa, Ryan
author_facet Voldoire, Théo
Ryder, Robin J.
Lahfa, Ryan
contents Elite civil servants may come and go between the public and private sectors throughout their career, a process of particular interest for the public and social scientists. However, data to document such processes are rarely completely available: we need inference tools that can account for many missing values. We consider public-private paths of elite French civil servants and introduce binary Markov switching models with Bayesian data augmentation. Our procedure relies on two complementary data sources: (1) detailed observations of some individual trajectories obtained from LinkedIn; (2) less informative ``traces'' left by all individuals in the administrative record, which we model for missing data imputation. This model class maintains the properties of hidden Markov models and enables a tailored sampler to target the posterior, yet allows for varying parameters across individuals and time. By integrating the two sources, we can consider the whole population rather than just a sample, and avoid the biases that would stem from using only a single source. We demonstrate this allows to properly test substantive hypotheses on career paths across a variety of public organizations. We notably show that the probability for ENA graduates to exit the public sector has not increased since 1990, but that the probability they return has increased. We identify three clusters of organizations, with distinct patterns of public-private behaviors.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_15257
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Some are observed, all leave traces: whole-population modeling of French elite civil servants' career paths
Voldoire, Théo
Ryder, Robin J.
Lahfa, Ryan
Applications
Methodology
62P25 (Primary) 62F15, 62M05 (Secondary)
Elite civil servants may come and go between the public and private sectors throughout their career, a process of particular interest for the public and social scientists. However, data to document such processes are rarely completely available: we need inference tools that can account for many missing values. We consider public-private paths of elite French civil servants and introduce binary Markov switching models with Bayesian data augmentation. Our procedure relies on two complementary data sources: (1) detailed observations of some individual trajectories obtained from LinkedIn; (2) less informative ``traces'' left by all individuals in the administrative record, which we model for missing data imputation. This model class maintains the properties of hidden Markov models and enables a tailored sampler to target the posterior, yet allows for varying parameters across individuals and time. By integrating the two sources, we can consider the whole population rather than just a sample, and avoid the biases that would stem from using only a single source. We demonstrate this allows to properly test substantive hypotheses on career paths across a variety of public organizations. We notably show that the probability for ENA graduates to exit the public sector has not increased since 1990, but that the probability they return has increased. We identify three clusters of organizations, with distinct patterns of public-private behaviors.
title Some are observed, all leave traces: whole-population modeling of French elite civil servants' career paths
topic Applications
Methodology
62P25 (Primary) 62F15, 62M05 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.15257