Education choices and returns to schooling: Mothers' and youths' subjective expectations and their role by gender

Attanasio, Orazio; Kaufmann, Katja

doi:10.1016/j.jdeveco.2014.04.003

Cited by 162 publications

(107 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…This paper also contributes to the literature on imperfect information and educational choices. The evidence shows that students have imperfect knowledge of their own ability (Stinebrickner & Stinebrickner, 2012Zafar, 2011;Bobba & Frisancho, 2014) and are uncertain about their returns to education (Jensen, 2010;Attanasio & Kaufmann, 2015;Wiswall & Zafar, 2015). Our results suggest that the ordinal rank is one of the reasons why students have incorrect beliefs about their absolute ability.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 65%

A Big Fish in a Small Pond: Ability Rank and Human Capital Investment

Elsner

Isphording

2017

Journal of Labor Economics

161

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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. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. We study the impact of a student's ordinal rank in a high school cohort on educational attainment several years later. To identify a causal effect, we compare multiple cohorts within the same school, exploiting idiosyncratic variation in cohort composition. We find that a student's ordinal rank significantly affects educational outcomes later in life. If two students with the same ability have a different rank in their respective cohort, the higher-ranked student is significantly more likely to finish high school, attend college, and complete a 4-year college degree. These results suggest that low-ranked students under-invest in their human capital even if they have a high ability compared to most students of the same age. Exploring potential channels, we find that students with a higher rank have higher expectations about their future career, a higher perceived intelligence, and receive more support from their teachers. NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARYParents often believe that high-ability classmates have a positive influence on their children, and potential classmates are often a decisive factor for choosing a school. In this paper, we show that having high-ability peers in school is not beneficial for everyone. A student who is surrounded by peers that are smarter than herself has a low ordinal rank within her peer group, which may come with some disadvantages. While she may benefit from studying with smarter peers, she may experience a disadv...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 65%

A Big Fish in a Small Pond: Ability Rank and Human Capital Investment

Elsner

Isphording

2017

Journal of Labor Economics

161

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“…Table 3 shows that individuals' expected returns are an important predictor for the decision to enroll in college, even after controlling for an extensive set of individual and family background characteristics. The perceived probabilities of working and perceived earnings risk, on the other hand, are not significant (while Attanasio and Kaufmann (2014) find that these measures are relevant for the decision to enroll in senior high school). As higher ability youths expect higher returns to college, the coefficient on the expected return to college becomes slightly smaller after controlling for youths' GPA and parents' education.…”

Section: The Income Gradient and Expected Returnsmentioning

confidence: 71%

Understanding the income gradient in college attendance in Mexico: The role of heterogeneity in expected returns

Kaufmann

2014

Quantitative Economics

109

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Differences in college enrollment between poor and rich are striking in Latin America. Explanations such as differences in college preparedness and credit constraints have been advanced. An alternative explanation could be differences in information sets between poor and rich, for example, about career opportunities, translating into different expected returns to college. Poor people might expect low returns and thus decide not to attend or they might face high (unobserved) costs that prevent them from attending despite high expected returns. I use data on people's subjective expectations of returns to address this identification problem. I find that poor individuals require higher expected returns to be induced to attend college than individuals from rich families. Testing predictions of a model of college attendance shows that poor individuals are particularly responsive to changes in direct costs, which is consistent with them being credit constrained. Performing counterfactual policy experiments, I find that a sizeable fraction of poor individuals would change their decision in response to a reduction in direct costs and that these individuals at the margin have expected returns that are as high or higher than the individuals already attending college.

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“…First, the assignment system is regulated by strict and observable criteria: stated preferences on schools and scores in 1 See, e.g., Ajayi (2013) and Avery and Hoxby (2012). 2 Nguyen (2008), Jensen (2010) provide evidence on the effects of providing information about population-average returns to education, while Attanasio and Kaufmann (2014), Kaufmann (2014), , , Hastings, Neilson, and Zimmerman (2015) more narrowly focus on the role of subjective beliefs about future earnings. Hastings and Weinstein (2008), Mizala and Urquiola (2013) document the role of providing information about school quality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning about Oneself: The Effects of Performance Feedback on School Choice

Bobba

Frisancho

2016

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work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-IGO BY-NC-ND 3.0 IGO) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/igo/ legalcode) and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any non-commercial purpose, as provided below. No derivative work is allowed.Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC-IGO license.Following a peer review process, and with previous written consent by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a revised version of this work may also be reproduced in any academic journal, including those indexed by the American Economic Association's EconLit, provided that the IDB is credited and that the author(s) receive no income from the publication. Therefore, the restriction to receive income from such publication shall only extend to the publication's author(s). With regard to such restriction, in case of any inconsistency between the Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license and these statements, the latter shall prevail.Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license.The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inter-American Development Bank, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.http://www.iadb.org 2016 Abstract * This paper designs and implements a field experiment that provides students from less advantaged backgrounds with individualized feedback on academic performance during the transition from middle to high school. The intervention reduces the gap between expected and actual performance, as well as shrinks the variance of individual ability distributions. Guided by a simple Bayesian model, the paper empirically documents the interplay between variance reductions and mean changes of beliefs in shaping curricular choices. The shift in revealed preferences on high school tracks enabled by the intervention affects schooling trajectories, with better-performing students being assigned into more academically oriented options.JEL classifications: D83, I21, I24, J24

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Education choices and returns to schooling: Mothers' and youths' subjective expectations and their role by gender

Cited by 162 publications

References 18 publications

A Big Fish in a Small Pond: Ability Rank and Human Capital Investment

A Big Fish in a Small Pond: Ability Rank and Human Capital Investment

Understanding the income gradient in college attendance in Mexico: The role of heterogeneity in expected returns

Learning about Oneself: The Effects of Performance Feedback on School Choice

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