News

A Study on Sibling Spillovers on College and Major Choice Published in QJE

24 February, 2021

Dejan Kovac and Marin Drlje have co-authored a paper entitled "O Brother, Where Start Thou? Sibling Spillovers on College and Major Choice in Four Countries" that has been accepted to be published by the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

The paper examines a rather challenging topic: the influence of an older sibling's previous choice of university on a younger sibling's response to enroll in a university or to choose a similar major. The outcomes demonstrate that individuals opt for better universities when an older sibling has attended university before them and that they are more likely to follow their sibling's career path and choose a high-quality education. The authors gathered and presented evidence from four geographically distant countries and found similar results.

"The fact that siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but instead a more generalizable description of human behavior," explains one of the authors, Dejan Kovac.

"I am very proud of this research publication. It has been a long path but we are happy that we finally have it. As CERGE-EI alumni and being part of the larger CERGE-EI "family", we hope that there will be spillover effects and we will see many more articles published in QJE journal from other CERGE-EI "family members" in the years to come," he adds.

The journal is the oldest professional journal of economics in the English language, edited at Harvard University's Department of Economics, covering all aspects of the field. It is one of the core economics journals, consistently ranked among the top titles.