Over the course of higher education expansion and growing numbers of graduates, employers are supposed to have increasing difficulties to regard a higher education degree as reliable signal for productivity. As a consequence, they may take into account ‘qualitative’ differences such as...

Our study focuses on the gender gap in college aspirations and enrolment among high school students in Germany. We build on socialisation theory, rational choice theory, and formal restrictions to college access to explain gender differences in idealistic college aspirations, realistic college...

Grenet et al. (2022) examine the effect of quasi-random early offers on the probability of accepting an offer in the Germany's university admission process. The authors demonstrate that the early offers lead to a statistically significant increase in the likelihood of accepting an offer. Their...

This paper studies the determinants of college major choice using a unique "information" experiment embedded in a survey. We first ask respondents their self-beliefs - beliefs about their own expected earnings and other major-specific outcomes conditional on various majors, their population...

In this paper we use a newly constructed dataset following 30,000 Italian individuals from high school to labor market and we analyze whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major, their academic performance and their labor market income. We...

Taking advantage of unique longitudinal data, we provide the first characterization of what college students believe at the time of entrance about their final major, relate these beliefs to actual major outcomes, and, provide an understanding of why students hold the initial beliefs about majors...