Emil Chrisander defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Economics

Candidate:

Emil Chrisander, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

Title:

Essays on Student Behavior: Peer Conflicts, Honesty, and School Choice

Supervisors:

Associate Professor Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen
Professor David Dreyer Lassen

Assessment Committee:

Associate Professor Miriam Wüst, Department of Economics
Associate Professor Rustamdjan Hakimov, University of Lausanne
Professor Tommy Andersson, Lund University

Summary:

This dissertation explores student behavior in three self-contained chapters. Student behavior is an important topic because it influences adolescence and adult life for good or for worse. This dissertation analyses two types of student behavior: peer conflicts and choice of education. These are relevant policy topics because i) students involved in peer conflicts have worse life prospects than students who do not take part in peer conflicts, and ii) students’ choice of education partly determines their future wealth and opportunities. The first chapter is an empirical analysis of why students’ admission behavior to higher education does not correspond to expectations from standard economic theory. This chapter contributes to the growing body of research that shows unexpected non-truthful admission behavior. Our findings inform policymakers on how to design admission systems, and in particular how to mitigate adverse conse- quences of non-truthful reporting. The second chapter is an empirical analysis of the causal relationship between a sibling’s birth order and her risk of peer conflicts in school. This is a relevant question because peer conflicts are harmful to students and birth order is an observable condition which enable schools and policy makers to act. The third and final chapter is a theoretical analysis that proposes a novel feature to a popular mechanism for admission systems. The feature allows students to partially reveal valuable private information to colleges. This is important work because it addresses problems of efficiency and fairness that can occur if public available information about students does not reveal students’ preparedness for a study program. E.g., a student’s math score from high school may not be a good indicator for preparedness to study artwork. It is relevant for policies related to the design of admission systems and two-sided markets with information frictions.