Freshmen teachers and college major choice: Evidence from a random assignment in Chile

Mohit Karnani

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We exploit the exogenous characteristic of random freshmen course assignment in a large Chilean university to identify the causal effect of teachers and their qualitative characteristics over students' major choice. Using administrative records, we establish what makes students from the "Commercial Engineering" career chose between an "Economics" major or a "Business" major. We find that first-economic-course teachers may account for 15-22% of the probability of choosing Economics as a major. We also identify which characteristics of these teachers make students more prone to choosing this particular major. These results are robust to the inclusion of different covariates and specifications. Placebo-type falsification tests are performed, confirming our findings.

Keywords: Freshmen; Teachers; College Major; Random Assignment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A22 C93 I23 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/76062/1/MPRA_paper_76062.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:pra:mprapa:76062

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().