IdEP Seminar, Ingrid Mikkelsen - "Evaluating Affirmative Action When College Applications Are Endogenous"
Institute of Economics
Date: 10 January 2024 / 12:30 - 13:30
Online in MS Teams
I study an affirmative action policy aimed at improving gender balance within college fields. The policy boosts the application scores of individuals whose gender is underrepresented in the program they apply to. Since the admission design is strategy-proof, these extra points should only affect the probability of admission conditional on applying, not college applications themselves. Using a novel dataset covering all college applications in Norway, however, I find that candidates of the underrepresented gender are much more likely to apply when they receive the boost. When programs introduce (end) the policy, they receive about 15 percent more (fewer) applicants of the underrepresented gender. This response exists along the entire distribution of application scores, including among individuals who would have been admitted absent affirmative action had they just applied. I subsequently estimate how the policy affects academic and labor market outcomes of those shifted in versus those shifted out of their preferred program by the policy under different assumptions about application behavior.
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Meeting ID: 314 860 231 119
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