Scams involving university degrees are flourishing in many emerging markets. Using a resume experiment in India, this paper studies the impact of gray degrees, or potentially bought academic credentials from questionable universities, on callback rates to job applications. The experiment varied the type of degree (no, gray, and authentic) in online applications to entry-level jobs that require no university qualification. We find that gray degrees increase callback rates by 42 percent or 8 percentage points relative to having no degree. However, we also document that gray degrees fare on average worse than authentic degrees. These empirical patterns are consistent with a model where employers have beliefs about the authenticity of degrees and are discounting gray-degree universities probabilistically. We discuss our findings with respect to the Indian context.

中文翻译：

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灰色大学学位：来自印度的实验证据

在许多新兴市场中，涉及大学学位的骗局正在蓬勃发展。本文使用印度的简历实验，研究了灰度学位或可能从有问题的大学购买的学历证书对求职回拨率的影响。该实验将在线应用程序的学位类型（无，灰色和真实）更改为不需要大学学历的入门级工作。我们发现，与没有学位相比，灰色学位可使回调率提高42％或8个百分点。但是，我们还记录了平均而言，灰度等级的票价要比真实等级差。这些经验模式与雇主对学位的真实性有信心并在概率上打折灰色大学的模型相一致。