Not All Transitions Are Equal: The Relationship Between Effects on Passing Steps in a Sequential Process and Effects on the Final Outcome

Abstract

This article deals with a model for describing a sequence of events, for example, education is typically attained by a set of transitions from one level of education to the next. In particular, this article tries to reconcile measures describing the effect of a variable on each of these transitions, with measures describing the effect of this variable on the final outcome of that process. Such a relationship has been known to exist within a sequential logit model, but it has hardly been used in empirical research mainly because of an absence of a practical way of giving it a substantive interpretation. This article tries to provide such an interpretation by showing that the effect on the final outcome is a weighted sum of the effects on each transition, such that a transition gets more weight if more people are at risk of passing that transition, passing the transition is more differentiating, and people gain more from passing.