1,720,995 research outputs found
The returns to elite university education: a quasi-experimental analysis
No full textI take advantage of a discontinuity in the probability of admission to a highly selective private university to estimate causal returns to investing in elite university education. I use a newly assembled data set that combines individual administrative records about high school attendance, university admission, university attendance, and tax returns. I find a discontinuity in income of 38 log points at the admission cutoff. The fuzzy regression discontinuity estimate for the elite enrollment effect is 58 log points. This should be interpreted as the average treatment effect for students applying to the elite university who are close to the cutoff and chose to enroll. When I take into account the evidence that students enrolling in the elite university tend to make different field choices, the net institutional enrollment premium is 41 log points. Cumulated over 15 years, the net-of-tuition elite premium is €246,991. I explore potential channels explaining the sizeable enrollment effects and I find that students just above the admission cutoff are 15 percentage points more likely to complete a university degree, they are 26 percentage points more likely to graduate on time and attend university with substantially higher quality peers
Replication Data for: "Education during COVID: Policy Choices, Family Compensation and Learning Losses"
No full textThis is the replication data for the paper "Education during COVID: Policy Choices, Family Compensation and Learning Losses
The effects of high school peers’ gender on college major, college performance and income
No full textUsing a newly-constructed longitudinal dataset of 30,000 Italian individuals, we analyse whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major and labor market outcomes. To identify causation, we exploit random assignment of classmates within school-cohort. We generally do not find significant effects of peer gender on college choice and following outcomes. Only male students graduating from classes with a very large majority of male peers were more likely to choose “prevalently male” (PM) college majors (Economics, Business and Engineering). This impact, however, was undone by major-attrition and did not affect labour market outcomes
Gender of Siblings and Choice of College Major
Full text linkIn this study we analyze whether the gender composition of siblings within a family affects the choice of College Major. The question is whether a family environment that is more gender-homogeneous encourages academic choices that are less gender stereotyped. We use the last name and the exact family address contained in a unique dataset covering 30,000 Italian students graduated from high school between 1985 and 2005 to identify siblings. We follow the academic career of these individuals from high school to college graduation. We find that mixed gender siblings within a family tend to choose college majors following a stereotypical gender specialization. Namely, males have higher probability of choosing male dominated majors such as Engineering and women higher probability of choosing female dominated majors such as Humanities. Same-gender siblings, on the other hand, have higher probability of making non-gender stereotyped choices. This college major choice is not driven by the choice of high school academic curriculum, which appears to be mainly function of geographical proximity to schools
Fertility drain or fertility gain? Emigration and fertility during the Great Recession in Italy
Full text linkHow does emigration affect fertility in the country of origin? We address this question by estimating counterfactual fertility during the Great Recession in order to understand what the effect of the recession on fertility would be in the absence of emigration. Between 2009 and 2014, Southern European countries suffered from harsh economic instability, which triggered a sharp drop in fertility and a spike in emigration. We focus on Italy, exploiting the richness of the Italian Administrative Registry of Italians Residing Abroad (AIRE), which records information about all Italian citizens moving their residence abroad, as well as Italian birth records. Using an instrumental variable approach, which helps overcome endogeneity issues in the fertility-migration relationship, we find a positive impact of emigration on the total fertility rate at the Italian province level. This result suggests that emigrants are selected among those individuals who have a lower risk of having children. Therefore, in the absence of emigration, counterfactual fertility would have been lower than it actually is. Such a positive effect of out-migration on fertility in the area of origin could thereby lead to an underestimation of the effect of the recession on fertility
Foreign students in college and the supply of STEM graduates
Full text linkDo foreign students affect the likelihood domestic students obtain a STEM degree and occupation? Using administrative student records from a U.S. university, we exploit idiosyncratic variation in the share of foreign classmates in introductory math classes and find thatforeign classmates displace domestic students from STEM majors and occupations. However, displaced students gravitate towards high earning Social Science majors, so that their expected earnings are not penalized. We explore several mechanisms. Results indicate that displacement is concentrated in classes where foreign classmates possess weak English language ability, suggesting that diminished in-class communication and social interactions might play animportant role
Robots, marriageable men, family, and fertility
No full textRobots have radically changed the demand for skills and the role of workers in production. This phenomenon has replaced routine and mostly physical work of blue collar workers, but it has also created positive employment spillovers in other occupations and sectors that require more social interaction and managing skills. This study examines how the exposure to robots and its heterogeneous effects on the labor market opportunities of men and women affected demographic behavior. We focus on the United States and find that in regions that were more exposed to robots, gender gaps in income and labor force participation declined, reducing the relative economic stature of men. Regions affected by intense robot penetration experienced also an increase in both divorce and cohabitation and a decline –albeit non-significant– in the number of marriages. While there was no change in the overall fertility rate, marital fertility declined, and there was an increase in nonmarital births. Our findings provide support to the hypothesis that changes in labor market structures that affect the absolute and relative prospects of men may reduce their marriage-market value and affect marital and fertility behavior
Individual vulnerability to industrial robot adoption increases support for the radical right
No full textThe increasing success of populist and radical-right parties is one of the most remarkable developments in the politics of advanced democracies. We investigate the impact of industrial robot adoption on individual voting behavior in 13 western European countries between 1999 and 2015. We argue for the importance of the distributional consequences triggered by automation, which generates winners and losers also within a given geographic area. Analysis that exploits only cross-regional variation in the incidence of robot adoption might miss important facets of this process. In fact, patterns in individual indicators of economic distress and political dissatisfaction are masked in regional-level analysis, but can be clearly detected by exploiting individual-level variation. We argue that traditional measures of individual exposure to automation based on the current occupation of respondents are potentially contaminated by the consequences of automation itself, due to direct and indirect occupational displacement. We introduce a measure of individual exposure to automation that combines three elements: 1) estimates of occupational probabilities based on employment patterns prevailing in the preautomation historical labor market, 2) occupation-specific automatability scores, and 3) the pace of robot adoption in a given country and year. We find that individuals more exposed to automation tend to display higher support for the radical right. This result is robust to controlling for several other drivers of radical-right support identified by earlier literature: nativism, status threat, cultural traditionalism, and globalization. We also find evidence of significant interplay between automation and these other drivers
Does emigration delay political change? Evidence from Italy during the great recession
No full textInternational mobility of people brings great opportunities and large overall benefits. Economically stagnant areas, however, may be deprived of talent through emigration. This may harm dynamism and political and economic change. Between 2010 and 2014, Italy experienced a large wave of emigration and two deep recessions and significant political change. Combining administrative data on Italian expatriates and data on characteristics of municipal councils, mayors and on local elections, we analyse whether emigration affected political change. Economic pull factors from foreign countries, interacted with the pre-existing networks of emigration from Italian municipalities allow us to construct a proxy for emigration that is municipality-specific and, as we show, independent of pre-existing political and economic trends. Using this proxy as an instrument, we find that municipalities with larger emigration rates had slower growth in the share of young, college educated and women among local elected officials. They were also more likely to have their municipal council dismissed and experienced lower political participation and a lower share of votes to anti-status-quo parties
Gender gap in Italy: the role of college majors
No full textUsing a novel database on high school careers, college careers and labor market outcomes for a panel of young Italians, this chapter analyzes the role of choice of college major as a determinant of gender gap in income. It finds that the very large difference of choice of college major by females, in favor of Humanities and shunning Engineering and Business majors, explains one third of the gender gap in income. Those differences are very persistent
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