%0 Report
        %A Brunello, Giorgio
%A Campo, Francesco
%A Lodigiani, Elisabetta
%A Miotto, Martina
%A Rocco, Lorenzo
        %T Tastes, Ability or Expected Wages? The Intended Choice of College Majors by Students in Italy
        %D 2026
        %8 2026 Mar
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 18444
        %U https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp18444
        %X We investigate the factors influencing the intended college major choices of high school students in Italy, ranking the relative importance of expected earnings, perceived ability, and major-specific tastes, that we measure directly using a Coller and Williams game. We find that major-specific tastes and self-assessed ability are significantly more influential in shaping academic intentions than mean expected earnings at age 30. We estimate that a one standard deviation change in the taste for (resp. perceived ability in) a given major increases the odds of choosing that major (relative to Humanities, our benchmark scenario) by 136.4% (resp. 114.1%), far outweighing the 39.3% increase associated with a one standard deviation change in mean expected earnings.
        %K major choice
%K Italy
%K expectations