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" Essays on College Major Choice: "
Ekbatani, Sepehr
von Wachter, Till Marco; Pinto, Rodrigo
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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905238
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TL36w8x72c
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| Main Entry
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Ekbatani, Sepehr
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| Title & Author
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Essays on College Major Choice:\ Ekbatani, Sepehrvon Wachter, Till Marco; Pinto, Rodrigo
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| College
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UCLA
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Abstract
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This dissertation contains three essays in applied microeconomics. The first chapter evaluatesthe welfare costs induced by limiting the number of choices in deferred acceptancemechanisms. I show that when the number of choices is capped, some students have to bestrategic and that increasing the size of the submittable list can result in better matches,and therefore lead to welfare improvement. I use Iranian college entrance dataset to estimatea novel discrete choice model for centralized university systems, in which I relax theindependence of unobserved preference shocks assumption. I validate the model with out of sample data from a quasi-experimental policy change, in which the list cap was increasedby 50 percent. In my counterfactual analysis, I calculate that a list cap of 10 choices insteadof 100 would incur a 14.2 percent welfare loss. This is equivalent to a 453 km increase inthe home-university distance, which is 2.6 times the average distance traveled by Iranianstudents. I also show that a more restrictive list cap does not affect students at the top andbottom of the ranking, but hurts students with average scores and benefits students in thelower quartile. In the second chapter, I use the aforementioned dataset to find determinantsof major choice. I estimate a rank ordered logit model of major choice and show that labormarket variables, specifically earnings and unemployment play a significant role in choiceof majors by students. The model shows that students prefer majors with higher expectedincome and expected employment rate. This study also suggests that many students care more about the school they are applying to, rather than the major. Several explanations ispossible, for example prestige of some schools might be one reason. Credit constraints thatfamilies face or the cultural barriers might also play a role for those students who prefer tostay in their hometown even at the price of studying a major they are not very interestedin. Finally, in the third chapter I use neural networks to predict the number of quartersthat it takes a student with certain characteristics to graduate from UCLA. I also define asurvival model, in such those who did graduate before sixth year were survivors and thosewho couldn't were the failures.
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von Wachter, Till Marco; Pinto, Rodrigo
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UCLA
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