This paper studies how college major choices shape earnings and fertility outcomes. Using administrative data that link students' preferences, random assignment to majors, and post-college outcomes, we estimate the causal pecuniary and nonpecuniary returns to different fields of study. We...

This paper examines the role of sibling sex composition as a potential explanation of the transmission of parental advantages to the next generation. The presence of a brother affects the family environment and parents' decisions, influencing the siblings' labour market outcomes in the long...

Immigrants across Europe earn less and work in lower-quality jobs than natives, but the mechanisms underlying these disparities remain poorly understood. This paper asks whether immigrant disadvantage reflects barriers to accessing good jobs or skill deficits that persist even within similar...

An extensive literature has documented the incentive effect of emigration prospects in terms of human capital accumulation at origin. Less attention has been paid to the impact on specific educational choices. Using novel data from graduates from the University of Lorraine (France) we find that...

We study how adolescents' second-order beliefs about their parents' occupational preferences shape gendered career aspirations. In a consequential early-career choice setting, we combine a parental choice experiment with a randomized salience intervention among students. Parents give gendered...

The economic impact of technological change will critically depend on how future workers invest in their human capital. Yet, little is known about how future workers themselves evaluate and choose their educational and occupational paths in light of emerging technologies. This paper examines how...

We investigate the factors influencing the intended college major choices of high school students in Italy, ranking the relative importance of expected earnings, perceived ability, and major-specific tastes, that we measure directly using a Coller and Williams game. We find that major-specific...

We study optimal taxation in economies with general equilibrium market clearing, where agents with privately known labor skills and entrepreneurial abilities choose between deterministic labor income and risky firm operation. The government observes labor income and realized dividends but not...

How do students' earnings expectations differ by being the first in their family to attend university (FiF) and how do they affect field of study choice? We leverage unique survey and administrative data to document sizable gaps in expected earnings between FiF and non-FiF students. Our data can...

Im Land Bremen verbleiben nur 36 Prozent der in der Kindertagesbetreuung beschäftigten Erzieher:innen zehn Jahre nach Berufseinstieg noch im Berufsfeld. Elternzeit, Tätigkeits- und Berufswechsel, ein Wechsel in andere Bundesländer oder der vollständige Rückzug aus dem Erwerbsleben betreffen...

Für die Energiewende werden in unterschiedlichen Berufen Fachkräfte dringend gesucht: Allein in den 31 für die vorliegende Studie betrachteten energierelevanten Berufen konnten im Jahr 2024 knapp 119.000 der insgesamt knapp 185.000 offenen Stellen nicht besetzt werden. Damit liegt die...

In Umsetzung des Koalitionsvertrages für die 21. Legislaturperiode wurde durch die Bundesministerin für Bildung, Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend, Karin Prien, am 17. Juli eine Kommission "Bürokratiearme Umsetzung der Entgelttransparenzrichtlinie" eingerichtet . Sie soll bis Ende Oktober...

This paper studies how college major choices shape earnings and fertility outcomes. Using administrative data that link students’ preferences, random assignment to majors, and post-college outcomes, the researchers estimate the causal pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns to different fields of...

This study examines whether awareness of implicit gender-science stereotypes influences university enrollment in STEM fields. We designed a randomized controlled trial involving 566 Italian high school seniors, combining surveys with an Implicit Association Test to measure unconscious biases....

In Umsetzung des Koalitionsvertrages für die 21. Legislaturperiode wurde durch die Bundesministerin für Bildung, Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend, Karin Prien, am 17. Juli eine Kommission "Bürokratiearme Umsetzung der Entgelttransparenzrichtlinie" eingerichtet . Sie soll bis Ende Oktober...

Für die Energiewende werden in unterschiedlichen Berufen Fachkräfte dringend gesucht: Allein in den 31 für die vorliegende Studie betrachteten energierelevanten Berufen konnten im Jahr 2024 knapp 119.000 der insgesamt knapp 185.000 offenen Stellen nicht besetzt werden. Damit liegt die...

Are workers with poor outside opportunities less responsive and more susceptible to negative demand shifts in routine occupations? To answer this, I create and estimate an occupation specialization index (OSI) using Swedish register data and machine learning tools. It measures the expected...

Using Italian data, we study whether their intended choice of college major is affected by the college major selected by family members. We find evidence of strong inter-generational persistence, especially in medicine and health professions, followed by economics and law, and STEM. The effects...

We run a field experiment in which we provide information to students about job opportunities and hourly wages of occupations they are interested in. The experiment takes place within a widely-used career orientation program in the Netherlands, and involves 28,186 pre-vocational secondary...

We provide identification results for a broad class of learning models in which continuous outcomes depend on three types of unobservables: known heterogeneity, initially unknown heterogeneity that may be revealed over time, and transitory uncertainty. We consider a common environment where the...

The demand for information technology professionals in the United States is increasing while the number of available graduates is declining. Therefore, it is necessary to develop and refine strategies at all education levels and in business organizations to implement innovative approaches. These...

How do students’ earnings expectations differ by being the first in their family to attend university (FiF) and how do they affect field of study choice? We leverage unique survey and administrative data from a German university to document sizable gaps in expected earnings between FiF and...

How do students' earnings expectations differ by being the first in their family to attend university (FiF) and how do they affect field of study choice? We leverage unique survey and administrative data to document sizable gaps in expected earnings between FiF and non-FiF students. Our data can...

"We examine differences in jobs held by men and women based on a measure not used before, the standard human resources measures of "knowledge, skills, and abilities" generated by job analyses. While there is an abundance of evidence on gender disparities in pay, we know much less in detail about...

This paper shows that exposure to entrepreneurs during adolescence increases women's entry and performance in entrepreneurship and improves the allocation of talent in the economy. Using population-wide registry data from Denmark, we exploit idiosyncratic within-school, cross-cohort variation in...

In many countries, subsidies towards higher education and financial aid to students from poorer backgrounds have reduced socio-economic status (SES) gaps in undergraduate study. The increasing importance of graduate studies that are typically more expensive may, however, provide a new avenue for...

Competitive environments often leave room for "dirty" practices such as sabotage, retaliation, or dishonesty. We use an online experiment to document aggregate levels and individual differences in the willingness to engage in dirty competition and in the willingness to enter competitions where...

How do students' earnings expectations differ by being the first in their family to attend university (FiF) and how do they affect field of study choice? We leverage unique survey and administrative data from a German university to document sizable gaps in expected earnings between FiF and...

Children tend to choose the same occupations as their parents. We examine the implications of this tendency for talent allocation and intergenerational mobility. Using Swedish data on skills and personality traits, we estimate a general equilibrium Roy model with unequal occupational access...