IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crm/wpaper/26055.html

Tastes, ability or expected wages? The intended choice of college majors by students in Italy

Author

Listed:
  • Giorgio Brunello
  • Francesco Campo
  • Elisabetta Lodigiani
  • Martina Miotto
  • Lorenzo Rocco

Abstract

We investigate the factors influencing the intended college major choices of high school students in Italy, ranking the relative importance of expected earnings, perceived ability, and major-specific tastes, that we measure directly using a Coller and Williams game. We find that major-specific tastes and self-assessed ability are significantly more influential in shaping academic intentions than mean expected earnings at age 30. We estimate that a one standard deviation change in the taste for (resp. perceived ability in) a given major increases the odds of choosing that major (relative to Humanities, our benchmark scenario) by 136.4% (resp. 114.1%), far outweighing the 39.3% increase associated with a one standard deviation change in mean expected earnings.

Suggested Citation

  • Giorgio Brunello & Francesco Campo & Elisabetta Lodigiani & Martina Miotto & Lorenzo Rocco, 2026. "Tastes, ability or expected wages? The intended choice of college majors by students in Italy," RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series 26055, ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin).
    • Handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:26055
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/26055.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education
    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions

    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:26055. 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.