Career Choices and the Evolution of the College Gender Gap
研究发现，男性在职业体育等主导领域成为超级明星的回报上升，提高了男性上大学的机会成本，从而部分解释了大学性别差距的扩大。基于欧洲足球市场的自然实验提供了因果证据。
The opportunity cost for men of pursuing a college degree has been rising due to the increase in the rewards to becoming a superstar in occupations typically dominated by men, like professional sports. This suggests a novel explanation for the evolution of the college gender gap (which shows a clear upward trend in female college enrollments relative to male enrollments). Causal evidence from a natural experiment in European soccer markets—that provides exogenous variation in the expected earnings for men associated with a superstar path—supports this explanation: an increase in male earnings has a significant positive effect on the ratio of female to male tertiary enrollment in college education. Results are robust to using different samples of countries, to allowing for regional time trends, to analyzing lagged effects, to changing the definition of the treatment, and to exploiting alternative definitions of exposure.