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This paper aims to clarify how educational and occupational expectations of students are conditioned by school track under Japanese school-to-work linkage. We compare Japan to the US and Germany, which have specific characteristics of school-to-work linkage of their own according to the literature. Our analysis is based on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data collected by OECD. Using indicators from the literature, we can define the institutional characteristics of each country as follows: all the indicators are high in Germany, and low in the US, but in the case of Japan, the indicators for stratification and standardization are high, while vocational specificity is low. From the patterns of these indicators, we construct hypothesis about the effect of school track on students' educational and occupational expectations in each country. From our analysis, we can see that tracking in Germany strongly affects the educational and occupational expectations, while tracking in the US did not strongly affect either expectation. In Japan, school track strongly constrained educational expectations, but not occupational expectations. These results can be consistently interpreted as a consequence of different school-to-work linkages in these countries explained by using three indicators above. Therefore, we can conclude that we succeeded in clarifying distinguishing characteristics of the school track effect on student expectations in Japan compared to the US and Germany in relation to the institutional differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]