Lost in Transition: The Influence of Locus of Control on Delaying Educational Decisions

Willingness to compete, gender and career choices along the whole ability distribution

“…After every round, students got to know how many exercises they solved correctly, but they did not get to know the performance of other students.15 As the survey was part of a larger data collection project, it also contained opinion questions related to education, questions on students' aspirations, and unincentivized questions on variables such as time preferences, locus of control, and sunk-cost aversion. The locus of control measure and the aspirations from this survey are used inJaik and Wolter (2016) andJaik and Wolter (2019), respectively.16 The students could choose between four answers: Top quarter, top half, bottom half, bottom quarter.17 We actually wanted to elicit participants' beliefs about their own relative performance in the experiment in an incentivized way, and empirically compare the predictive power of the two confidence measures for study choices. Unfortunately, due to a bug in the program the answers to the Niederle-Vesterlund question were not recorded.…”

Does Ethnic Diversity in Schools Affect Occupational Choices?

“…In Switzerland, the choice postponement known as an "interim solution" usually entails an additional school year at the compulsory school level (for a detailed description, seeJaik and Wolter, 2016).…”