Yoav Goldstein - Research

Work in Progress

Heuristic Self-Evaluation and the Returns to STEM (in revision, new draft coming soon)

older version: Learning from Round Test Scores: University Field Choices and Career Outcomes

Human capital decisions shape long-term outcomes, yet students often make them under uncertainty about their own ability. Admissions to high-earning STEM programs rely on test scores that are noisy signals of ability. This paper studies how heuristics and self-evaluation influence the decision to pursue such programs. Using linked administrative data, I implement a regression discontinuity at a round-number threshold on an initial university entrance test. Although the threshold has no official role in admissions, crossing it sharply increases applications to STEM, consistent with left-digit bias: students interpret a higher first digit as a signal of ability. Affected students retake the exam, improve their scores, and enroll in STEM. Over the next two decades, they are more likely to work in the technology sector, earn higher wages, and reach the upper tail of the earnings distribution. The findings show how misperceived ability can deter students from selective fields, generating persistent disparities in economic opportunity unrelated to actual talent.

Changing Minds: How Academic Fields Shape Political Attitudes with Matan Kolerman-Shemer (draft is available upon request)

Academic specialization is central to postsecondary education. While its labor-market effects are well documented, this paper examines the less-explored effects on politics. We link entry and exit surveys for 310,000 students at 477 U.S. four-year colleges (1990–2019). Using selection-on-observables with rich controls—including baseline ideology and intended major—we estimate plausibly causal effects of major choice. Humanities and social sciences shift ideology left by 5 percentage points (0.10 SD) compared to natural sciences. Economics and business shift it right by the same magnitude. Fields also polarize policy views, especially on economic issues, and shape behaviors such as voting and protesting. Preference changes also appear to be a likely mechanism for wage returns: economics and business raise the priority placed on wealth compared to other fields. Sensitivity analysis shows that unobserved selection would need to be unrealistically strong to overturn the results. Quasi-experimental evidence from supply shifts in field availability supports the causal interpretation. Results suggest academic content, not peer influence or earnings expectations, drives the effects. Given major selection patterns, specialization in postsecondary education contributes to political polarization and gender gaps in political attitudes.

Gifted Children Programs’ Short and Long-Term Impact: Higher Education, Earnings, and the Knowledge-Economy with Victor Lavy (in revision, new draft coming soon)

older version: NBER w29779

This paper examines the short-run and longer-term effects of studying in gifted classes in high schools. Our results show that GCPs have tiny effects on high school academic achievement but substantially influence university outcomes. This influence is manifested in the choice of field of study, a higher incidence of double majors, and an increased likelihood of pursuing advanced degrees. Interestingly, participation in gifted classes does not affect earnings or employment in knowledge-based sectors, implying that gifted children do well in the labor market regardless of their participation in a special class. Finally, participation in gifted classes does not affect the likelihood of marriage or having children. Still, it positively affects the spouse’s “quality” driven by marriages between gifted students and their classmates. We discuss potential mechanisms by relating our findings to the literature in psychology about gifted children.

Published and Forthcoming Papers

Challenging Encounters and Within-Physician Practice Variability with Gabriel Chodick, Ity Shurtz and Dan Zeltzer

Forthcoming at The Review of Economics and Statistics

We examine how physician decisions are impacted by difficult cases - encounters with newly diagnosed cancer patients. Using detailed administrative data, we compare primary care physicians' decisions in visits that occurred before and after difficult cases and matched comparison cases by the same physicians on other dates. Immediately following a difficult case, physicians increase referrals for common tests, including diagnostic tests unrelated to cancer. The effect lasts only for about an hour, and is not driven by patient selection or schedule disruption. The results highlight difficult encounters as a source for variability in physician practice.

Realization of Low Probability Clinical Risks and Physician Behavior: Evidence from Primary Care Physicians with Gabriel Chodick and Ity Shurtz

Forthcoming at The American Journal of Health Economics

We examine whether primary care physicians alter their clinical decision-making following realizations of low probability risks among their patients -- events of colon cancer diagnoses. Relying on comprehensive administrative visit level data from a large Israeli HMO, we find that physicians increase their patients' use of colonoscopy tests substantially during the first three months following such events and that in the subsequent twelve months the effect dissipates. We find no indication that older -- typically more experienced -- physicians are less responsive to Events, nor do we find that physicians' response varies by their gender. Considering that in our setting, it is unlikely that colon cancer diagnoses convey information in the traditional sense, these results indicate the existence of attention effects. Unexpected events induce a stronger physician response and the increase in the use of colonoscopy tests is more pronounced among patients that are similar to the patient involved in the event, in line with recent work on cognitive mechanisms and memory where surprises and associative memory play a key role in decision making. We also do not find evidence that the quality of colonoscopy tests decreases with the increase in their use, suggesting that in response to events, physicians induce adherence to colonoscopy tests among their at-risk patients rather than merely lowering the cut-off risk level of prescribing colonoscopy tests.