Working Papers:
Mental Models of High School Success
with Robert Mahlstedt, Pia Pinger, Sonja Settele and Helene Willadsen
Using surveys with Danish students transitioning to secondary education, we study mental models of how gender and parental education shape academic performance. Students hold heterogeneous beliefs about performance gaps by gender and parental background, which appear to be shaped by within-family transmission and broader social environments. Open-text responses reveal that respondents link strong performance by girls and less socioeconomically privileged students to effort, while attributing privileged students' success to external advantages. Mental models matter: beliefs about performance gaps predict enrollment in upper secondary education by gender and parental education and causally affect students’ self-assessments, intended effort, and educational aspirations, as shown in an information experiment with girls. We highlight two mechanisms: updating about the returns to effort and about gender-specific effort costs in response to observed gender performance gaps. Our findings advance the understanding of education choices and shed light on the determinants and effects of mental models in a high-stakes setting.
Work In Progress:
Self-Promotion in Job Applications [Draft available upon request]
I examine how self-promotion—measured as self-reported skill levels on a 0-10 scale impacting job prospects—varies according to individual characteristics and is influenced by strategic concerns. Using an incentivized survey experiment simulating an early-stage application form, I find that women, on average, self-report lower skill levels compared to men, conditional on actual ability. This gender gap is prominent in assessments of logical thinking skills and less pronounced in evaluations of English skills. By implementing an information intervention that informs participants about upcoming tests following their self-reported skill levels, I manipulate the scope for strategic concerns in self-reporting skills. In response to these variations, the gender gap appears to be stable. The results of this paper suggest that differences in self-promotion by socioeconomic status (SES), on the other hand, are largely associated with strategic considerations. Absent the treatment, there is no significant SES gap, given equal performance. However, individuals with high SES tend to provide substantially lower self-reported scores when anticipating skill assessment tests, while low-SES participants display consistently stable self-reported scores in comparison.