Do wage expectations predict college enrollment? Evidence from healthcare

Jürg Schweri and Joop Hartog

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2017, vol. 141, issue C, 135-150

Abstract: We study the effect of ex ante expected wages rather than realized wages on the decision to pursue a nursing college education in Switzerland. On average, wage expectations reflect observed market wages, but with large dispersion among individuals. We collected data from a full cohort of healthcare trainees in their third year of training on upper-secondary level. Those trainees who expected a greater return from nursing college (tertiary level) were more likely to enroll in nursing college later on; the effect is substantial and almost orthogonal to individuals’ characteristics. This indicates that policies that increase returns from studying nursing can indeed attract new students to reduce the shortage of nurses. Subjective ex ante wage expectation data are useful in predicting the decision to enroll in college.

Keywords: College enrollment; Subjective expectations; Training; Wage; Fractional regression; Nursing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D84 I11 I21 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268117301683
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Wage Expectations Influence the Decision to Enroll in Nursing College? (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:eee:jeborg:v:141:y:2017:i:c:p:135-150

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2017.06.010

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().