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Author: Xia, Xiaoyu
Resulting in 2 citations.
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Xia, Xiaoyu |
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Essays on Decision Making in the Labor and Housing Market Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, 2014. Also: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5v70g5vd Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: University of California - Berkeley Keyword(s): College Major/Field of Study/Courses; Earnings; Expectations/Intentions; Kinship; Occupations; Parental Influences; Siblings Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. The first chapter studies how college students learn about the earning opportunities associated with different majors. I use data from two major longitudinal surveys to develop and estimate a learning model in which students update their expectations based on the contemporaneous earning realizations of older siblings and parents. Reduced-form models show that the probability of choosing a major that corresponds to the occupation of an older sibling or parent is strongly affected by whether the family member is experiencing a positive or negative earnings shock at the time the major choice is made. Building on this finding, I estimate a model of major choice that incorporates learning from family-based information sources. The results imply that students overestimate the predictive power of family members' earnings: the decision weight placed on family wage realizations is much larger than can be justified by the empirical correlation between their own earnings and their family members' earnings. |
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Bibliography Citation
Xia, Xiaoyu. Essays on Decision Making in the Labor and Housing Market. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, 2014.. |
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Xia, Xiaoyu |
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Forming Wage Expectations through Learning: Evidence from College Major Choices Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 132,A (December 2016): 176-196. Also: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268116302426 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Elsevier Keyword(s): College Major/Field of Study/Courses; Learning Hypothesis; Occupations; Siblings; Wages How do college students choose their majors, and what role does the family play in their choices? I use data from two major longitudinal surveys to develop and estimate a model in which students learn about earning opportunities associated with different majors through the wages of older siblings and parents. The probability of a student choosing a major that corresponds to the occupation of a family member is strongly correlated with the family member's wage at the time the major choice is made. This correlation remains strong after controlling for family-correlated abilities or preferences, and additional empirical evidence suggests that the observed correlation arises through a family-based wage information channel. |
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Bibliography Citation
Xia, Xiaoyu. "Forming Wage Expectations through Learning: Evidence from College Major Choices." Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 132,A (December 2016): 176-196.
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