| dc.description.abstract | Choosing college and field of study is important as it shapes individuals' earnings, working conditions, and lifestyles. Economists are interested in knowing determinants of education decisions, how various mechanisms and educational policies affect students choices for a long time. Moreover, apart from the effects of students' education decisions on their lifestyles, these decisions have crucial impacts on macroeconomic factors in the long run because they are national level talent allocation problems. Therefore, understanding underlying factors, motivations, and strategies are crucial to design better admissions mechanisms, education and labor market policies, and achieve efficient talent allocation. To this end, there are many rich datasets that come from centralized admissions mechanisms and longitudinal studies providing environments to investigate students' choices from real world examples. This dissertation develops new empirical methods to understand students' college admissions and major choice behavior in three different settings. In the first chapter, a practical and data-driven econometric method is developed to understand students' college preferences from their reported rank-order lists in centralized college admissions, which requires weaker assumptions and has better predictive power. In the second chapter, the effects of students' college preferences on their college admissions preparation strategies are analyzed and the effects of preferences are documented using college admissions data from Turkey. The significant relationship between preparation and application behavior suggests new financial aid and affirmative action policies. In the third chapter, the effects of marriage-expectations on college-major choices are tested with a copula-based method using the National Longitudinal Study of Youth data and existence of these effects cannot be rejected. | |
