Pamela Giustinelli, Bocconi University

Getting In and Getting Through: Ex Ante Beliefs and Counterfactual Outcomes in Centralized College Admissions

Abstract

We study belief accuracy in a centralized higher-education admissions system using Norwegian data that combine a large pre-admission expectations survey with administrative records on offers, enrollment, and completion. Program-specific cutoffs provide a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that identifies objective counterfactual outcomes at the admission margin and allows direct comparison with subjective, state-contingent beliefs (first-choice access versus the relevant second-choice offer state). We find that enrollment forecast errors are driven mainly by mistaken beliefs about offer probabilities, while beliefs about enrollment conditional on an offer are comparatively accurate. For completion, the dominant error is persistence optimism: applicants substantially overestimate completion conditional on enrollment under both access states. Applicants also overstate first-minus-second returns for both enrollment and completion. These errors are economically meaningful for choices: in a partial-equilibrium counterfactual exercise, correcting beliefs implies large declines in the predicted probability of keeping the currently ranked first choice on top.

Pamela Giustinelli is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Bocconi University and Associate Editor at The Economic Journal.

Pamela is an applied microeconometrician interested in uncertainty, heterogeneity, and measurement. Her research deals with the economics and econometrics of individuals' expectations and other subjective phenomena, and with how subjective expectations and perceptions shape microeconomic behavior under uncertainty. Her research combines applied microeconomic theory, theory-based survey measurement, and applied microeconometrics, and has often a human capital angle, while spanning applications in economics of education, family, health, labor, climate change, firms, and intersections of theirs.

You can read more about Pamela Giustinelli here

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