Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP18587
Authors: Stanislav Avdeev; Nadine Ketel; Hessel Oosterbeek; Bas van der Klaauw
Abstract: We use admission lotteries for higher education studies in the Netherlands to investigate whether someone’s field of study influences the study choices of their younger peers. We find that younger siblings and cousins are strongly affected. Also younger neighbors are affected but to a smaller extent. These findings indicate that a substantial part of the correlations in study choices between family members can be attributed to spillover effects and are not due to shared environments. Our findings contrast with those of recent studies based on admission thresholds, which find no sibling spillovers on field of study (major) choices. Because we also find spillovers from lottery participants at the lower end of the ability distribution, the contrasting findings cannot be attributed to the different research designs (leveraging admission lotteries versus admission thresholds). We believe that the different findings are due to the small differences in quality between universities in the Netherlands, making differences in the prestige of fields of study more prominent.
Keywords: Major choice; Higher education; Peer effects; Admission lotteries
JEL Codes: I23; I24; J10
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Older sibling's choice (D15) | Younger sibling's study choice (C92) |
| Older sibling's choice (D15) | Younger cousin's study choice (Y80) |
| Older sibling's choice (D15) | Neighbor's study choice (C92) |
| Younger sibling's study choice (C92) | Enrollment probability (C46) |
| Younger cousin's study choice (Y80) | Enrollment probability (C46) |
| Neighbor's study choice (C92) | Enrollment probability (C46) |