The Role of Non-Pecuniary Considerations: Location Decisions of College Graduates from Low Income Backgrounds

Yifan Gong, Todd Stinebrickner, Ralph Stinebrickner and Yuxi Yao

No 32127, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We examine the initial post-college geographic location decisions of students from hometowns in the Appalachian region that often lack substantial high-skilled job opportunities, focusing on the role of non-pecuniary considerations. Novel survey questions in the spirit of the contingent valuation approach allow us to measure the full non-pecuniary benefits of each relevant geographic location, in dollar equivalents. A new specification test is designed and implemented to provide evidence about the quality of these non-pecuniary measures. Supplementing perceived location choice probabilities and expectations about pecuniary factors with our new non-pecuniary measures allows us to estimate a stylized model of location choice and obtain a comprehensive understanding of the importance of pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors. We also combine the non-pecuniary measures with realized location and earnings outcomes to characterize inequality in overall welfare.

JEL-codes: J0 J32 J38 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab and nep-ure
Note: ED LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32127.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Role of Non-Pecuniary Considerations: Locations Decisions of College Graduates from Low Income Backgrounds (2022)
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:nbr:nberwo:32127

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32127
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).