Overconfidence and career choice

Jonathan Schulz () and Christian Thoeni ()
Additional contact information
Christian Thoeni: University of Lausanne
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Christian Thöni

No 2014-15, Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham

Abstract: People self-assess their relative ability when making career choices. Thus, confidence in own abilities is likely an important factor for selection into various career paths. In a sample of 711 first-year students we examine whether there are systematic differences in confidence levels across fields of study. We find evidence for selection based on our experimental confidence measure: While Political Science students exhibit the highest confidence levels, students of Humanities range at the other end of the scale. This may have important implications for subsequent earnings and/or professions students select themselves in.

Keywords: Overconfidence; selection; field of study; career choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cta and nep-edu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cedex/documents/paper ... on-paper-2014-15.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Overconfidence and Career Choice (2016)
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:not:notcdx:2014-15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jose V Guinot Saporta ().