Events

Miss Xinyao QIU
Ph.D. Candidate of Economics
Stanford University

I study disparities in college major choices across students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and analyze their implications for intergenerational income mobility. One potential explanation for these disparities is differential access to information about majors’ academic content and personal fit. To explore the role of information frictions on major choices, I use administrative data from the centralized college application system in China. Consistent with the information inequality hypothesis, I document that students of low socioeconomic status (SES) are 21.6% (3.16percentage points) more likely than their high-SES peers to choose majors that are familiar to them from their high school curricula. Further support for the information inequality hypothesis comes from a survey experiment in which high school students report their expectations about college majors and from information spillovers among high school classmates. To discuss the economic consequences, I calibrate a model of major choice and find that, because of information inequality, low-SES students face higher mismatch rates and lower future incomes than their high-SES peers. Counterfactual analyses indicate that information interventions and affirmative action policies can effectively narrow the income gap across socioeconomic backgrounds.