The Big Sort: College Reputation and Labor Market Outcomes
研究了大学声誉如何影响学生择校和初次就业的“大分流”过程，利用哥伦比亚的自然实验数据发现，当引入新的个人能力衡量指标时，声誉的回报会下降，但声誉仍与毕业生收入增长正相关。
We explore how college reputation affects the “big sort,” the process by which students choose colleges and find their first jobs. We incorporate a simple definition of college reputation—graduates' mean admission scores—into a competitive labor market model. This generates a clear prediction: if employers use reputation to set wages, then the introduction of a new measure of individual skill will decrease the return to reputation. Administrative data and a natural experiment from the country of Colombia confirm this. Finally, we show that college reputation is positively correlated with graduates' earnings growth, suggesting that reputation matters beyond signaling individual skill.