IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/kud/kucebi/1912.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Higher Education and Financial Behavior: The effect of studying mathematics and economics on financial outcomes

Author

Listed:
  • Kristoffer Balle Hvidberg

    (CEBI, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen)

Abstract

This paper presents new evidence on the effect of education on financial behavior. In particular, I investigate whether obtaining a degree from a study program with a mathematical or economic curriculum affects individuals future loan default probability. I identify the causal effects of different types of education on financial behavior by exploiting the GPA admission thresholds to higher education programs in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. I compare people who have applied for the same fields of study but who are quasi-randomly allocated to different different fields of study due to small differences in their GPA from upper secondary school. I estimate the effects using a unique combination of administrative data on admissions to post-secondary education and third party reported data on the universe of personal loans. I find that completing a mathematical or economic field of study decreases the probability of default post graduation for the applicants who did not have one of these fields as their most preferred field of study.

Suggested Citation

  • Kristoffer Balle Hvidberg, 2019. "Higher Education and Financial Behavior: The effect of studying mathematics and economics on financial outcomes," CEBI working paper series 19-12, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI).
  • Handle: RePEc:kud:kucebi:1912
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econ.ku.dk/cebi/publikationer/working-papers/CEBI_-_WP-_12_-19.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Financial Behavior; Education; Regression Discontinuity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G5 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance
    • I2 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kud:kucebi:1912. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Hoffmann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cebkudk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.