We explore how unexpected temporary increases in the demand for low-skill service jobs in the tourism industry impact educational choices in Italy. We identify exogenous variation in the demand for service jobs using positive shocks to the tourism industry caused by terrorist attacks in foreign...

Faculty sexual misconduct harms individual students and can also reshape the academic pathways of entire cohorts. This paper by Blueprint research Sarah Cohodes and Katherine Leu links verified misconduct cases to nationwide data on degree completion to measure how these incidents influence...

College graduates tend to marry each other. We use detailed Norwegian data to show that strong assortativity further arises by institution and field of study, especially among high earners from elite programs. Admission discontinuities reveal that enrollment itself, rather than selection,...

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...

Horizontal gender segregation in education negatively impacts both equity and efficiency in the labor market, contributing to disparities in career opportunities and economic outcomes. This paper examines the influence of social origins on gender segregation in Italian tertiary education over...

Die Zahl der Studierenden hat in Deutschland ihren Höhepunkt überschritten und dürfte zukünftig weiter abnehmen wie schon länger die Jahrgangsstärke und inzwischen auch die Studierneigung. Für die Hochschulen verschärft das den Wettbewerb und sie müssen sich vermehrt um ihre aktuellen...

This study provides the first causal analysis of the impact of expanding Computer Science (CS) education in U.S. K-12 schools on students' choice of college major and early career outcomes. Utilizing rich longitudinal data from Maryland, we exploit variation from the staggered rollout of CS...

Die Zahl der Studierenden hat in Deutschland ihren Höhepunkt überschritten und dürfte zukünftig weiter abnehmen wie schon länger die Jahrgangsstärke und inzwischen auch die Studierneigung. Für die Hochschulen verschärft das den Wettbewerb und sie müssen sich vermehrt um ihre aktuellen...

Can public diplomacy efforts effectively change target country public’s perception of the sender country? Public diplomacy has been regarded as a means of promoting a country's soft power, and many countries have been exerted great about of effort and resources in this pursuit by building...

We analyze whether field of study assigned at age 16 impacts mental health in adulthood. Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits GPA cut-offs, we find that admission to the preferred study field improves mental health, lowering both the incidence of antidepressant prescriptions and...

Gender pay gaps in earnings are well-documented in the literature. However, new factors contributing to women's lower earnings have emerged and remain under-researched. Educational choices are among them. We use a rich administrative dataset from Poland, a Central Eastern European country with...

Much research shows that students take account of their perceived comparative advantage in mathematics relative to verbal skills when choosing college majors and career tracks. There is also evidence for an important role for comparative advantage in explaining the gender gap in college STEM...

Faculty sexual misconduct targeted at students is a widespread problem. The consequences of such incidents include direct harm to victims and may also entail a loss to science if students who encounter misconduct become discouraged from continuing their studies in their chosen field. We link...

We study whether gender differences in university major choices result from anticipated labor market discrimination. First, we document two novel facts using administrative transcript records from a large Midwestern university: women are less likely to study science, technology, engineering, and...

We argue that college students' field-of-study choices significantly influence how economies respond to labor market disruptions. To do so, we develop and estimate a framework featuring forward-looking students who choose a field of study when entering college, and subsequently make decisions...

We estimate causal effects of 121 graduate degrees on log earnings. The returns average 0.159 but vary widely across fields, with a standard deviation of 0.176. Experience profiles of the returns also vary and are particularly steep for medicine. Internal rates of return, which account for...

This paper investigates the impact of studying the first-choice university subject on dropout and switching field of study for a cohort of students in Germany. Using detailed survey data, and employing an instrumental variable strategy based on variation in the local field of study availability,...

Multiple unordered treatments with a binary instrument for each treatment are common in policy evaluation. This multiple treatment setting allows for different types of changes in treatment status that are non-compliant with the activated instrument. Therefore, instrumental variable (IV) methods...

Students may hold inaccurate beliefs about earnings and employment opportunities when making their education decisions. This paper analyzes the effects of information provision on student’s intended and actual college major choices in Georgia. Secondary school students in our experiment...

This paper investigates the impact of studying the first-choice university subject on dropout and switching field of study for a cohort of students in Germany. Using detailed survey data, and employing an instrumental variable strategy based on variation in the local field of study availability,...

This paper investigates the impact of studying the first-choice university subject on dropout and switching field of study for a cohort of students in Germany. Using detailed survey data, and employing an instrumental variable strategy based on variation in the local field of study availability,...

Multiple unordered treatments with a binary instrument for each treatment are common in policy evaluation. This multiple treatment setting allows for different types of changes in treatment status that are non-compliant with the activated instrument. Therefore, instrumental variable (IV) methods...

Multiple unordered treatments with a binary instrument for each treatment are common in policy evaluation. This multiple treatment setting allows for different types of changes in treatment status that are non-compliant with the activated instrument. Therefore, instrumental variable (IV) methods...

We document the skill content of college majors as perceived by employers and expressed in the near universe of U.S. online job ads. Social and organizational skills are general in that they are sought by employers of almost all college majors, whereas other skills are more specialized. In turn,...

The labor-market payoff to workers with associate degrees in healthcare and STEM occupations is very high in Massachusetts. We examine whether this induced a growing proportion of students in MA community colleges (MACCs) to earn an associate degree (AD) in one of these fields. We do this by...

We document the skill content of college majors as perceived by employers and expressed in the near universe of U.S. online job ads. Social and organizational skills are general in that they are sought by employers of almost all college majors, whereas other skills are more specialized. In turn,...

We document the skill content of college majors as perceived by employers and expressed in the near universe of U.S. online job ads. Social and organizational skills are general in that they are sought by employers of almost all college majors, whereas other skills are more specialized. In turn,...

Weaker retention of women in quantitatively oriented fields, particularly STEM* is widely seen in US higher education. This persistence gap is often explained by less generous grading in these fields and the conjectured tendency of female students to generally exhibit stronger "sensitivity" to...

I show how local supply changes create ripple effects in a national educational market. Admitting an applicant to a program will free up a slot to be filled at her next-best alternative. To investigate such substitution effects I re-engineer the centralized admission system of the Danish...

Das Fach Wirtschaftsinformatik hat schon seit Jahrzehnten einen festen Platz an den Universitäten in Deutschland. Die Nachfrage nach Absolventen des Fachs ist ungebrochen hoch. Gleichzeitig steht die Disziplin vor der Herausforderung, sich gegenüber anderen anwen‐ dungsorientierten...

We study the relation between the presence of superstar firms and college students' major choice. Salient occurrences of superstar performers in an industry are followed by a sharp rise in the number of college students choosing to major in related fields. This cohort effect remains significant...

We investigate the matching algorithm used by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions (ZVS) in medicine and related subjects. This mechanism consists of three procedures based on final grades from school ("Abiturbestenverfahren", "Auswahlverfahren der Hochschulen") and on...

This paper uses administrative student and expenditure data from Florida public universities to describe a) how the cost of producing graduates varies by major, b) how the inclusion of major-specific instructional costs alters the estimated net returns to different fields of study, and c) how...

We investigate whether the field of study influences university students’ political attitudes. To disentangle self-selection from learning effects, we first investigate whether the fields of study chosen by the incoming students correlate with their political attitudes. In a second step we...

This paper examines the determinants of the choice of field of study by university students using data from the Canadian National Graduate Survey. The sample of 18,708 graduates holding a Bachelor degree is interesting in itself knowing that these students completed their study and thus...