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Worker Signals Among New College Graduates: The Role Of Selectivity And Gpa, Brad J. Hershbein
Worker Signals Among New College Graduates: The Role Of Selectivity And Gpa, Brad J. Hershbein
Brad J. Hershbein
Recent studies have found a large earnings premium to attending a more selective college, but the mechanisms underlying this premium have received little attention and remain unclear. In order to shed light on this question, I develop a multidimensional signaling model relying on college grades and selectivity that rationalizes students’ choices of effort and firms’ wage-setting behavior. The model is then used to produce predictions of how the interaction of the signals should be related to wages, namely that the return on college GPA should fall the more selective the institution attended. Using five data sets that span the early …