Determinants of College Major Choice: Identification Using an Information Experiment

By Matthew Wiswall, basit. zafar. 2015

678 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/16382cffb2ee127914dc0f127d868028e1da47e0

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Citations in the corpus

Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, neutral): “…et al., 2020b), educational aspirations (Lergetporer et al., 2018b), schooling decisions (Jensen, 2010), major choice (Bleemer and Zafar, 2018; Conlon, 2019; Wiswall and Zafar, 2014), postgraduate enrolment (Berkes et al., 2019) as well as school choice (Ajayi et al., 2017; Andrabi et al., 2017).”
Student Awareness of Costs and Benefits of Educational Decisions: Effects of an Information Campaign and Media Exposure (2014, positive): “A study by Wiswall and Zafar (2011) also finds that even very high”
Best Practices for Using Hedonic Property Value Models to Measure Willingness to Pay for Environmental Quality (2020, positive): “…with some consumers being misinformed at the time of purchase even when it comes to high-stakes financial decisions such as choosing a college major (Wiswall and Zafar 2015), choosing a health insurance plan (Handel and Kolstad 2015), or developing a strategy to save money for retirement…”
The Specificity of General Human Capital: Evidence from College Major Choice (2015, background): “Recent papers, such as Poletaev and Robinson ð2008Þ, Gathmann and Schönberg ð2010Þ, and Yamaguchi ð2012Þ, have focused more on task-specific human capital, stressing that what matters is not the job’s label but the actual tasks a job employs.”
Survey Measurement of Probabilistic Macroeconomic Expectations: Progress and Promise (2017, neutral): “Zafar (2013) and Wiswall and Zafar (2015) surveyed college students regarding their choice of major, elicited expectations for the monetary and nonmonetary returns to alternative majors, and combined the expectations and choice date to estimate 430 Manski random utility models of choice of major.”
Field of Study, Earnings, and Self-Selection* (2016, neutral): “Examples can be found in observational studies that use IV to study workers’ selection of occupation, firms’ decision on location, or fami7See e.g. Hastings et al. (2013a), Betts (1996), Wiswall and Zafar (2014), and Reuben et al. (2013).”
Human Capital Investments and Expectations about Career and Family (2016, positive): “The information experiment embedded in the survey has been used to understand the determinants of college major choice and to investigate how students update their expectations (see Wiswall and Zafar 2015a, 2015b).”
University Differences in the Graduation of Minorities in Stem Fields: Evidence from California (2013, neutral): “See Arcidiacono, Kang, and Hotz (2012), Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (2011), Wiswall and Zafar (2012), and Zafar (forthcoming).”
Parents’ Beliefs about Their Children’s Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments (2019, neutral): “For example, if parents maximize returns and the investment is a perceived substitute with performance (i.e., a higher-return investment for a lower-performing child), @s ⇤ @a 0; if it is a perceived complement, @s ⇤ @a 0.8 I discuss the predictions for @s⇤ @a for each investment as I 5See for exam”
The Price Is Right: Updating Inflation Expectations in a Randomized Price Information Experiment (2016, positive): “3 This finding is generally consistent with a literature that shows individuals can be uninformed when making decisions of economic significance: low-income families are unaware of basic features of the Earned Income Tax Credit (Chetty and Saez, 2013); students have incorrect perceptions of returns ”