Abstract

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions, but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small, or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups, and this suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.

中文翻译：

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哦兄弟，你从哪里开始？四个国家的大学和专业选择的兄弟姐妹溢出*

摘要

人们普遍认为家庭和社交网络会影响重要的人生决定，但众所周知，确定这些影响的因果关系具有挑战性。我们使用来自智利、克罗地亚、瑞典和美国的数据，研究了不同国家背景下大学和专业选择的家庭内部溢出效应。利用直接影响年长但不影响弟弟妹妹的大学选择的大学特定入学门槛，我们表明，在所有四个国家中，有相当一部分弟弟妹妹跟随他们的哥哥姐姐进入同一所大学或大学-专业组合。无论他们的目标选项和反事实选项在质量上是否有大的、小的甚至是负面的差异，都会遵循年长的兄弟姐妹。然而，如果哥哥从大学辍学，溢出效应就会消失 这表明哥哥姐姐的大学经历很重要。兄弟姐妹在如此不同的背景下影响重要的人力资本投资决策表明，我们的发现不是特定制度细节的产物，而是对人类行为的更普遍的描述。亲密同龄人的高等教育路径之间的因果关系可能部分解释了社会群体之间持续存在的大学入学不平等现象，这表明改善大学入学机会的干预措施可能会产生乘数效应。