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Testing the effects of an unobservable factor: Do marriage prospects affect college major choice?

Hayri Alper Arslan, Brantly Callaway, Tong Li

arXiv 25 Oct 2024 · Econometrics · 1 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2410.19947 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Motivated by studying the effects of marriage prospects on students' college major choices, this paper develops a new econometric test for analyzing the effects of an unobservable factor in a setting where this factor potentially influences both agents' decisions and a binary outcome variable. Our test is built upon a flexible copula-based estimation procedure and leverages the ordered nature of latent utilities of the polychotomous choice model. Using the proposed method, we demonstrate that marriage prospects significantly influence the college major choices of college graduates participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (97) Survey. Furthermore, we validate the robustness of our findings with alternative tests that use stated marriage expectation measures from our data, thereby demonstrating the applicability and validity of our testing procedure in real-life scenarios.

Citation extraction

30
references
44
in-text mentions
30
distinct cited
1
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13,676
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 79% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Beffy, M., Fougere, D., and Maurel, A (2012) Choosing the field of study in postsecondary education: Do expected earnings matter?0.84333100%
2Rinott, Y. and Samuel-Cahn, E (1994) Covariance between variables and their order statistics for multivariate normal variables0.81142100%
3Lee, L.-F (1983) Generalized econometric models with selectivity0.73732100%
4Arcidiacono, P (2004) Ability sorting and the returns of to college major0.64422100%
5Dahl, G. B (2002) Mobility and the return to education: Testing a roy model with multiple markets0.64422100%
6Ge, S (2011) Women's college decisions: how much does marriage matter?0.64422100%
7Keane, M. P. and Wolpin, K. I (1997) The career decisions of young men0.64422100%
8Siegel, A. F (1993) A surprising covariance involving the minimum of multivariate normal variables0.64422100%
9Stinebrickner, R. and Stinebrickner, T. R (2014) A major in science? initial beliefs and final outcomes for college major and dropout0.64422100%
10Wiswall, M. and Zafar, B (2015) Determinants of college major choice: Identification using an information experiment0.64422100%

Showing the top 10 of 30 scored citations.