Due primarily to the difficulty of obtaining ideal data, much remains unknown about how college majors are determined. We take advantage of longitudinal expectations data from the Berea Panel Study to provide new evidence about this issue, paying particular attention to the choice of whether to...

Unique new data from a college with a mandatory work-study program are used to examine the relationship between working during school and academic performance. Particular attention is paid to the importance of biases that are potentially present because the number of hours that are worked is...

Researchers have long been interested in understanding why a Strong relationship between family income and educational attainment exists at virtually all levels of schooling. In part due to a recent increase in the disparity between the wages of college graduates and the wages of individuals...

Gender differences in current and past job tasks may be crucial for understanding the gender wage gap. We use novel task data to address well-known measurement concerns, including that standard task measures assume away within-occupation gender differences in tasks. We find that unique measures...

This paper examines academic peer effects in college. Unique new data from the Berea Panel Study allow us to focus on a mechanism wherein a student's peers affect her achievement by changing her study effort. Although the potential relevance of this mechanism has been recognized, data...

Uncertainty about future income plays a conceptually important role in college decisions. Unfortunately, characterizing how much earnings uncertainty is present for students at college entrance and how quickly this uncertainty is resolved has proven to be difficult. This paper takes advantage of...

While a large literature is interested in the relationship between family and labor supply outcomes, little is known about the expectations of these objects at earlier stages. We examine these expectations, taking advantage of unique data from the Berea Panel Study. In addition to characterizing...

An important feature of post-secondary schooling is the experimentation that accompanies sequential decision-making. Specifically, by entering college, a student gains the option to decide at a future time whether it is optimal to remain in college or to drop out, after resolving uncertainty...

Unique longitudinal probabilistic expectations data from the Berea Panel Study, which cover both college and early post-college periods, are used to examine young adults' beliefs about their future incomes. We introduce a new measure of the ex post accuracy of beliefs, and two new approaches to...

We examine the initial post-college geographic location decisions of students from hometowns in the Appalachian region that often lack substantial high-skilled job opportunities, focusing on the role of non-pecuniary considerations. Novel survey questions allow us to measure the full...