Journal article
Early subjective completion beliefs and the demand for post-secondary education
Johannes S Kunz, Kevin E Staub
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization | Elsevier | Published : 2020
Abstract
We provide a comprehensive empirical analysis on the role of beliefs about the probability of completing post-secondary education, elicited before the end of secondary school, for students’ future education choices. Although there is substantial evidence on the relevance of subjective beliefs for returns to post-secondary education conditional on completion, there is little evidence linking early beliefs to the extensive margin of completing a degree. We exploit (i) a representative population sample which (ii) follows students over a long time horizon, two key features largely absent from the previous literature on subjective beliefs. We find that completion beliefs are mainly related to co..
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Awarded by Ames Research Center
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Joseph Altonji, Orazio Attanasio, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Eric Bettinger, Holger Bonin, Dan Black, Timo Boppart, Simon Burgess, Buly Cardak, Gregory Crawford, Thomas Dohmen, Ernst Fehr, Dan Hamermesh, Joe Hirschberg, Jamie Gloor, David Johnston, Uli Kaiser, Ed Lazear, Edwin Leuven, Katrine Loken, Jenny Lye, Leslie Martin, EeCheng Ong, Paul Oyer, Philippe Ruh, Kjell Salvanes, Florian Schaffner, Carmit Segal, Andreas Steinhauer, Steven Stillman, Sabrina Studer, Rainer Winkelmann, Joachim Winter, and seminar participants at Adelaide, AASLE (Canberra), AMES (Seoul), EEA (Geneva), ESAM (Sydney), ESPE (Berlin), LACEA (Medellin), Melbourne, the Ski and Labor Seminar, SSES (Lugano), the Workshop of Personnel Economics and Economics of Education, Zurich Workshop on Economics (Schaffhausen), and Zurich, for helpful comments and suggestions; and Daniel Auer and Luca Tonizzo for very helpful research assistance. Staub acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council through grant DE170100644.