The Impact of Television Programmes on Teenage Career Aspirations The 'MasterChef Effect'

Giorgio Di Pietro

No 9804, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In recent years, in Italy, a larger number of students have chosen to attend vocational hospitality and catering schools. This paper investigates the extent to which this increase may have been triggered by the growing popularity of the cooking reality show MasterChef, in which the chef profession is portrayed as exciting and glamorous. Using panel data methods and controlling for several potential confounding variables, the analysis attempts to separate the effect of MasterChef from that of other determinants of the decision to attend vocational hospitality and catering schools. The results show that an increase of one percentage point in the audience of MasterChef is associated with an increase in the proportion of final year lower secondary school students willing to enrol at vocational hospitality and catering schools of between 0.25 and 0.35 percentage points. This finding suggests that popular television programmes like MasterChef may play an important role in complementing and supplementing government measures aimed at promoting vocational training among youths.

Keywords: panel data analysis; vocational hospitality and catering schools; teenage career aspirations; MasterChef (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 I21 J44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - revised version published as 'Do media play a role in promoting vocational education and training? The case of MasterChef' in: Policy Studies, 2018, 39 (1), 37-53

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9804.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9804

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().