Does Exposure To Economics Bring New Majors To The Field? Evidence From A Natural Experiment

Andreas Steinmayr, Hans Fricke and Jeffrey Grogger

VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: This study investigates how exposure to an academic field influences students major choices. In particular, we analyze whether students who are inclined to study business change their intentions after being exposed to economics or law. We exploit a natural experiment at a Swiss university. All first year students face the same curriculum before they chose a major. An important part of the curriculum is a first year paper in business, economics, or law. Due to oversubscription of business, the university assigns the field of the paper in a standardized way unrelated to student characteristics. We find that assignment to economics raises the probability of majoring in economics by 2.7 percentage points, which amounts to 18 percent of the share of students who major in economics. The effect is entirely driven by male students.

JEL-codes: A22 I20 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/113158/1/VfS_2015_pid_549.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Exposure to Economics Bring New Majors to the Field? Evidence from a Natural Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: Does Exposure to Economics Bring New Majors to the Field? Evidence from a natural Experiment (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc15:113158

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().