IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crm/wpaper/26024.html

College Major Choice, Payoffs, and Gender Gaps

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher Campos
  • Pablo Muñoz
  • Alonso Bucarey
  • Dante Contreras

Abstract

This paper studies how college major choices shape earnings and fertility outcomes. Using administrative data that link students' preferences, random assignment to majors, and post-college outcomes, we estimate the causal pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns to different fields of study. We document substantial heterogeneity in these returns across majors and show that such variation helps explain gender gaps in labor market outcomes: women place greater weight on balancing career and family in their major choices, and these preference differences account for about 30% of the gender earnings gap among college graduates. Last, we use our causal estimates to evaluate the effects of counterfactual assignment rules that target representation gaps in settings with centralized assignment systems. We find that gender quotas in high-return fields can significantly reduce representation and earnings gaps with minimal impacts on efficiency and aggregate fertility.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher Campos & Pablo Muñoz & Alonso Bucarey & Dante Contreras, 2026. "College Major Choice, Payoffs, and Gender Gaps," RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series 26024, ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin).
    • Handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:26024
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/26024.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • I26 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Returns to Education
    • J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:26024. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Moritz Lubczyk or Matthew Nibloe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cmucluk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.