Experimental Design
We emailed 14,595 students at France's largest public university to participate in an online survey on study habits and perceptions of the labor market. Importantly, the survey was conducted in collaboration with the university, and therefore we are able to link students' survey responses with their academic records.
Within the survey, we conducted an information-provision experiment. We elicited beliefs on, and provide information about, the differential first-year earnings caused by academic distinctions, based on some of our previous work:
- Bargain, O., Astruc Le Souder, M., & Locks, G. (2024). A Question of Honor? The Labor Market Advantage of Academic Signaling. The Labor Market Advantage of Academic Signaling.
We want to measure how the information provided inside the survey affected the subsequent attitudes toward study effort, self-promotion, academic performance, and early career labor market outcomes. The main focus of our information-provision experiment is not to investigate if providing information (relative to not providing information) has an effect on the average effort exerted, and the probability of obtaining honors, just to name a few. When provided with the information about returns to academic mentions, some individuals may update their beliefs down and others may update the beliefs up, so those effects may cancel each other out. Instead, our main focus is to measure the causal effects on beliefs, by exploiting how individuals update relative to their prior beliefs. With that goal in mind, we will use econometric models used in some of our previous work such as
- Giaccobasso, M., Nathan, B., Perez-Truglia, R., & Zentner, A. Where Do My Tax Dollars Go? Tax Morale Effects of Perceived Government Spending. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
In any case, for transparency, we will also report the average effects on receiving the information and we will compare it the the causal effects on beliefs.
In the survey, we elicit beliefs on, and provide information about labor market benefits (wage premium) associated with achieving high academic honors. In particular, some individuals were selected to receive the following piece of information:
"A recent academic study of former master's students at [university_name] found that earning a "Bien" (Highest Honors) is associated with a 12.5% increase in cumulative earnings during the first year after graduation. This equates to approximately 1.5 additional salaries during that first year."
The hypotheses are the following:
1) Students are more willing to put additional effort when they find out that returns to obtaining academic honors are larger.
2) However, effects are heterogeneous depending on expected returns to additional effort. In particular, a signaling model predicts that students will respond more strongly the closer they are to the honors threshold, the more efficiently they convert study hours into GPA gains, and the more highly their prospective employers value academic distinctions.
Hence, our analysis will dig in into three key sources of heterogeneity:
a) GPA distance to "Bien" threshold
b) Students' perceived marginal returns to effort (i.e., marginal gains in GPA per additional hour of study)
c) How likely is that their expected prospective employers reward honors. More specifically, we will test for differential effects depending on the expected margin for negotiation in wages from prospective employers, and by major, e.g., econ/biz/mgmt. versus other majors (see Bargain, Astruc Le Souder, & Locks; 2024 for more details).
We are able to explore this heterogeneity based on a series of questions asked pre-treatment in the information-experiment survey. In particular, we ask students how likely they think they will be able to negotiate their wages in the job-seeking process and how their own GPA would change if they dedicate additional hours to study.
In addition, we also plan to explore some secondary forms of heterogeneity:
a) By gender
b) By risk-preference and self-confidence
c) Depending on how strong students value financial compensation when deciding to accept a job offer
d) For students in 2-year masters, we will explore if there are differences depending on whether they are in the 1st or 2nd year
e) We will also explore whether the information treatment "backfires" for those who are above the threshold, similar to what's documented in Robinson et al (2021)
Robinson, Carly D., et al. "The demotivating effect (and unintended message) of awards." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 163 (2021): 51-64.
Implementation details:
- The invitations were sent on 03-17-2025, 11:20am
- The pre-registration was closed a few minutes after, but researchers did not access the survey data until the survey was closed, on 03-22-2025, 1:59pm.