Replication data for: The Big Sort: College Reputation and Labor Market Outcomes

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) W. Bentley MacLeod; Evan Riehl; Juan E. Saavedra; Miguel Urquiola

Version: View help for Version V1

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APP2016-0126_data			10/12/2019 01:23:PM
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Project Citation:

MacLeod, W. Bentley, Riehl, Evan, Saavedra, Juan E., and Urquiola, Miguel. Replication data for: The Big Sort: College Reputation and Labor Market Outcomes. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2017. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2019-10-12. https://doi.org/10.3886/E113685V1

Project Description

Summary: We explore how college reputation affects the "big sort," the process by which students choose colleges and find their first jobs. We incorporate a simple definition of college reputation—graduates' mean admission scores—into a competitive labor market model. This generates a clear prediction: if employers use reputation to set wages, then the introduction of a new measure of individual skill will decrease the return to reputation. Administrative data and a natural experiment from the country of Colombia confirm this. Finally, we show that college reputation is positively correlated with graduates' earnings growth, suggesting that reputation matters beyond signaling individual skill.

Scope of Project

JEL Classification:
      I23 Higher Education; Research Institutions
      I26 Returns to Education
      J24 Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
      J31 Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials

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Published Versions

V1 [2019-10-12]

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