Modeling College Major Choices using Elicited Measures of Expectations and Counterfactuals

Arcidiacono, Peter; Hotz, V. Joseph; Kang, Songman

doi:10.3386/w15729

Cited by 65 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Similarly, Montmarquette, Cannings and Mahseredjian (2002) con…rm the importance of expected earnings on major choice and report signi…cant di¤erences in the marginal e¤ects of this variable by gender and race. In addition, Arcidiacono, Hotz and Kang (2010) propose that a substantial share of students would choose a di¤erent major if they made no error in their forecast of future earnings.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

College major choice and ability: Why is general ability not enough?

Bartolj

Polanec

2012

Economics of Education Review

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The choice of college major is one of the most important decisions students make. In this paper we study the impact of ability on college major choice, using a data set for full-time students enrolled in four-year business and economics programs o¤ered by the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayWe distinguish between general and major-speci…c ability, which measure di¤er-ent dimensions of cognitive ability. We show that both measures are important in explaining individual decisions and that misleading results can follow from observing only commonly employed general ability. We also …nd important gender di¤erences as males are more likely to base their major choice on the ability to complete the coursework, while females are more likely to decide according to unobserved preferences.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

College major choice and ability: Why is general ability not enough?

Bartolj

Polanec

2012

Economics of Education Review

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“…3 The MLSFH has previously also been known as the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP). models have addressed various decisions, such as contraception choice (Delavande, 2008a), portfolio allocation Rohwedder, 2011, Kezdi andWillis, 2011), fertility and sexual behavior (Shapira, 2010, education (Zafar, 2013, Arcidiacono et al, 2012, teacher career (van der Klaauw, 2012), committing a crime (Lochner, 2007), migration (McKenzie et al, 2013), strategies in games (Nyarko andSchotter, 2002, Bellemare et al, 2008), and the timing of Social Security claiming and retirement (van der Klaauw andWolpin, 2008, Hurd et al, 2004). We contribute to this line of work that combines choice data with data on subjective expectations to draw inferences on preferences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

HIV/AIDS-related Expectations and Risky Sexual Behaviour in Malawi

Delavande

Köhler

2015

Review of Economic Studies

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We use probabilistic expectations data elicited from survey respondents in rural Malawi to investigate how risky sexual behavior may be influenced by individuals' expectations about survival and future HIV status, which in turn depend on the perceived impact of HIV/AIDS on survival, expectations about own and partner's current HIV status, and expectations about HIV transmission rates. Subjective expectations, in particular about mortality risk but not the risk of living with HIV, play an important role in determining the decision to have multiple sexual partners. Using our estimated parameters, we simulate the impact of various policies that would influence expectations. An information campaign on mortality risk would decrease risky sexual behavior on average, while an information campaign on HIV transmission risks, which tend to be overestimated by respondents, would actually increase risky behavior. Also, the expansion of anti-retroviral therapy (ART) treatments to all individuals infected with HIV would increase risky sexual behavior for a quarter of the HIV-negative individuals or those who have not been tested because they are aware that ART increases life expectancy, and thus reduces the cost of becoming HIV-positive.We would like to thank

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“…At the same time the conditional logit is more restrictive than the multinomial logit in that it forces the coefficients of these variables to be the same across all choice options, which the multinomial logit does not (Andreß et al, 1997). Our application differs from such that use direct measures for X ij of majors not chosen by a person (Arcidiacono et al, 2012) in that variation in X ij was generated by interacting observed person characteristics with observed major characteristics (Shauman, 2006). viii Because computation of marginal effects hinges on fixed effects that are not estimated in the conditional (fixed-effects) logit model, we report coefficients as odds ratios.…”

Section: Diff Friends' Approvalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preferences, constraints, and the process of sex segregation in college majors: A choice analysis

Ochsenfeld

2016

Social Science Research

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The persistence of horizontal sex segregation in higher education continues to puzzle social scientists. To help resolve this puzzle, we analyze a sample of college entrants in Germany with a discrete choice design that allows for social learning from the experiences of others. We make at least two contributions to the state of research. First, we test whether essentialist gender stereotypes affect major selection mostly through internalization or rather as external constraints that high school graduates adapt their behavior to. Empirically, we find that internalized vocational interests better explain gendered major choices than conformance with friends' and parents' expectations does. Second, we scrutinize whether segregation results from women's anticipation of gendered family roles or from their anticipation of sex-based discrimination, but we find no evidence for either of these hypotheses. As in most previous studies, differences in mathematics achievement fail to explain gendered patterns of selection into college majors.

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Modeling College Major Choices using Elicited Measures of Expectations and Counterfactuals

Cited by 65 publications

References 2 publications

College major choice and ability: Why is general ability not enough?

College major choice and ability: Why is general ability not enough?

HIV/AIDS-related Expectations and Risky Sexual Behaviour in Malawi

Preferences, constraints, and the process of sex segregation in college majors: A choice analysis

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