Returns to College Quality, Gender Peer Effects and Choice of College Major

explore the role of college quality, high-school peers and siblings as determinants of individual labor market outcomes. My work is based on a newly collected dataset tracking 30,000 Italian students who graduated from high school between 1985 and 2005 through college and on the labor market. In the first chapter I focus on estimating causal economic returns to college quality. I take advantage of a sharp discontinuity in the probability of admission to an elite Italian university at the admission score cutoff to estimate causal returns to college education quality. I estimate that attending an elite university yields a 52% premium in yearly earnings. I explore the potential mechanisms and find that admitted students are more likely to graduate from college and choose different majors. Cumulated over 15 years, the net premium of attending the elite university amounts to...