Earnings Expectations on Mars and Venus

What we almost called this paper but went for the more conservative title below.

Decomposing Gender Differences in College Student Earnings Expectations
Liam Delaney, Colm Harmon and Cathy Redmond
Despite the increasing coverage and prevalence of equality legislation and the general alignment of key determining characteristics such as educational attainment, gender differentials continue to persist in labour market outcomes, including earnings. Recently, evidence has been found supporting the role of typically unobserved non-cognitive factors in explaining these gender differentials. We contribute to this literature by testing whether gender gaps in the earnings expectations of a representative group of Irish university students are explained by simultaneously controlling for gender heterogeneity across a wide array of cognitive and noncognitive factors. Non-cognitive factors were found to play a significant role in explaining the gender gap, however, gender differentials persist even after controlling for an extensive range of cognitive and non-cognitive factors. Nearly three-quarters of the short run and two-thirds of the long run differential could not be explained.

Graduates willing to settle for lower pay?

Of 338 final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students at UCD, Trinity, Dublin City University and Dublin Institute of Technology, over two-thirds are worried about graduating into a recession, according to a survey from last month by the Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. Story here.

Extraversion and Expectations about the Returns to Higher Education

Gergely and Kézdi discuss college enrollment, the Big Five personality traits (in particular extraversion), and earnings expectations in the context of Hungarian higher education. They report that conditional on IQ and various measures of other personality traits, as well as past schooling experience and past behavioral problems, more extraverted men expect lower returns to higher education.

Students' Earnings Expectations

There is a new working paper by César Alonso-Borrego and Antonio Romero-Medina (from the Economics Department in Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) on students' earnings expectations. The authors provide evidence on the perceived economic value of higher education to college students in terms of their reported expected and shadow wages. The results show that predictions for expected wages are similar across gender and become closer to actual wages as students approach graduation. The authors suggest that this is consistent with an improvement in the quality of student information used to forecast wages.