Preference for the workplace, investment in human capital, and gender

In this paper, we use a hypothetical choice methodology to robustly estimate preferences for workplace attributes. Undergraduate students are presented with sets of jobs that vary in their attributes (such as earnings and job hours flexibility) and asked to state their probabilistic choices. We show that this method robustly identifies preferences for various job attributes, free from omitted variable bias and free from considering the equilibrium matching of workers to jobs. While there is substantial heterogeneity in preferences, we find that women, on average, have a higher willingness to pay for jobs with greater work flexibility (lower hours, and part-time option availability) and job stability (lower risk of job loss), while men have a higher willingness to pay for jobs with higher earnings growth. In the second part of the paper, using data on students' perceptions about the types of jobs that would be offered to them conditional on their college major choices, we relate these job attribute preferences to major choice. We find that students perceive jobs offered to humanities majors to have fewer hours, more worktime flexibility, and higher stability than jobs offered to economics/business majors. These job attributes are found to play a role in major choice, with women exhibiting greater sensitivity to nonpecuniary job attributes in major choice.