News and Highlights

BYU Professors Eric Eide and Mark Showalter, in conjunction with SDSU's Michael Hilmer, have been featured in “The Atlantic” for their recent study on the influence of college selectivity and college major on earnings. They found that major-specific earnings vary markedly by college selectivity, with the strongest differences among business majors and the weakest differences among science majors. They also found that when comparing earnings of graduates from top colleges to middle or bottom ranked colleges, the distribution of students across majors can be as important as earnings differences by major in accounting for college selectivity earnings gaps.

BYU Professors Olga Stoddard and Jessica Preece conducted a field experiment to test a prominent theory about the source of the gender gap in leadership ambition: women’s higher aversion to competitive environments. Using politics as a context for their study, they employed two distinct subject pools – highly politically active individuals and workers from an online labor market. They found that priming individuals to consider the competitive nature of politics has a strong negative effect on women’s interest in political office, but not on men’s interest, hence significantly increasing the gender gap in leadership ambition.

BYU Economics Prof. Val Lambson and University of Chicago's John van der Berghe recently published their research in the "Journal of Economic Theory", one of the top journals in economics. Among other things, they found that when playing games, the higher