【Job talk】Preference Heterogeneity in Admission to Universities and the Effects of Minority Reserves: Improving Gender Balance in STEM Programs
2024/01/03
研討會日期 : 2024-01-03
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Mr. Yu-Kuan Chen (陳語寬)
地點 : Conference Room B110
主持人 : Professor Chu-An Liu
演講者簡介 : Mr. Yu-Kuan Chen is expected to receive his PhD from Rice University in 2024. His research interests are Economics of Education, Labor Economics, and Applied Microeconomics. He is applying for a position of the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica now.
演講摘要 : This paper studies the limits of minority reserves for gender-balancing in postsecondary admissions when university programs have heterogeneous preferences. Using data from a centralized post-secondary admission system in Taiwan, I estimate preferences for both applicants and programs, and explore how the preferences relate to the gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. To account for applicants’ and programs’ decision timing, I introduce a modified version of the truth-telling assumption for estimating preferences under a deferred-acceptance mechanism. On the program side, I find substantial heterogeneity across programs in gender preferences in their ranking of applicants, whereas on the applicants’ side, the largest difference between gender lies in male applicants’ preference for programs where students are strong in math, and the preference is higher for those with lower math scores. Female applicants’ emphasis on math is weaker and show less heterogeneity. Counterfactual simulations show that reserve seats for women in STEM programs lead to limited changes in female representation.
