The Discussion Papers series presents results from ongoing research projects and other research and analysis by SSB staff, intended for international journals or books. The views and conclusions in this document are those of the author(s).
This paper leverages discontinuities in admission cutoffs in the Norwegian higher education system to estimate the causal effect of entering a field of study on returns to wealth later in life. We find no statistically significant impact of entering any field of study on returns to wealth later in life, mainly because our estimation sample is too small to confidently identify the effect of field of study on returns to wealth. We thus conclude that we still do not know whether completing a specific field of study affects returns to wealth.
Keywords: Education and Inequality, College Admission
JEL classification: I24
Acknowledgements: The author thanks Michael Graber and Zhiyang Jia for valuable feedback and discussions, and Edwin Leuven for help with access to the data from Samordna Opptak under his DOPE project (Norwegian Research Council project number 275906). The article was written as part of a research project at Statistics Norway, supported by the Finance Market Fund (Research Council of Norway, project number 294978).
Martin B. Holm, University of Oslo. E-mail: m.b.holm@econ.uio.no