An Award for Katja Kaufmann in Munich

Katja Maria Kaufmann (assistant professor at the Department of Economics and IGIER) has been awarded the Distinguished CESifo Young Affiliate Award in the Economics of Education Research Area "for the scientific originality, policy relevance and quality of exposition of her paper presented at the CESifo annual area conference", held on September 3-4 in Munich.

The committee deciding about the award was headed by Eric Hanushek (Hoover Institute at Stanford University), who organized the conference attended by many leading labor and education economists.

Kaufmann presented a paper titled Educational Choices and Subjective Expectations of Returns: Evidence on Intra-Household Decisions and Gender Differences, co-authored by Orazio Attanasio (University College London). Using a data set of Mexican teenagers, Kaufmann and Attanasio found that boys care more about monetary returns from schooling than girls (in particular in the decision to attend college), while marriage market considerations seem particularly important for girls. Gender differences in preferences are smaller in families with more educated parents. Risk perceptions matter for the high school decision and seem generally more important from the perspective of the parents. In terms of the intra-household decision process, boys seem to either decide on their own or jointly with their fathers, while mothers are always involved in the schooling decisions of girls. The exact role of parents depends on household composition and parental education.

The CESifo Group, consisting of the Center for Economic Studies (CES), the Ifo Institute for Economic Research and the CESifo GmbH (Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research) is a research group which combines the theoretically oriented economic research of the university with the empirical work of a leading economic research.