Social interdependence is believed to play an important role in how people make individual choices. This paper presents a simple model constructed on the premise that people are motivated by their own payoff as well as by how their actions compare with those of other people in their reference...

Males and females are markedly different in their choice of college major. Two main reasons have been suggested for the gender gap: differences in innate abilities and differences in preferences. This paper addresses the question of how college majors are chosen, focusing on the underlying...

Because students rely on their subjective expectations when choosing a college major, understanding this process of expectations formation is crucial for education policy recommendations. This paper focuses on how college students form expectations about various major-specific outcomes. I...

We investigate the determinants of students’ university choice, with a focus on expected monetary returns, non-pecuniary factors enjoyed at school, and financial constraints, in the Pakistani context. To mitigate the identification problem concerning the separation of preferences,...

This paper presents some preliminary findings from Wave 5 of the Innovation Panel (IP5) of Understanding Society: The UK Household Longitudinal Study. Understanding Society is a major panel survey in the UK. In February 2012, the fifth wave of the Innovation Panel went into the field. IP5 used a...

This article studies the determinants of college major choice using an experimentally generated panel of beliefs, obtained by providing students with information on the true population distribution of various major-specific characteristics. Students logically revise their beliefs in response to...

We compare the inflation expectations reported by consumers in a survey with their behavior in a financially incentivized investment experiment designed such that future inflation affects payoffs. The inflation expectations survey is found to be informative in the sense that the beliefs reported...

The sensitivity of housing demand to mortgage rates and available leverage is key to understanding the effect of monetary and macroprudential policies on the housing market. However, since there is generally no exogenous variation in these variables that is independent of confounding factors...

Using the panel component of the Michigan Survey of Consumers we estimate a learning model of inflation expectations, allowing for heterogeneous use of both private information and lifetime inflation experience. We find that women, ethnic minorities, and less educated agents have a higher degree...

We investigate the pattern of educational assortative mating, its evolution over time, and its impact on household income inequality. To these ends, we use rich data from the U.S. and Norway over the period 1980-2007. We find evidence of positive assortative mating at all levels of education in...