Education and social preferences

I analyze the role of college majors on political views. My findings suggest that student's choice of major affects his subsequent political views. I estimate a Fixed Effect model that allows for two sources of individual heterogeneity. I also exploit the major-switching behavior of college students by looking at changes in political views among individuals who changed majors between their freshmen and senior year of college. After removing two sources of individual heterogeneity, I find that individuals who major in the social sciences and humanities become increasingly liberal and Democratic Party oriented, while business majors move in the opposite direction. Individuals who major in science and engineering do not change their political views in any direction. I explore the relationship between academic skills and political views. I find a novel and interesting correlation between SAT scores and political views. The evidence is conclusive: individuals with stronger math skills are associated to conservative political views, while individuals with stronger verbal skills are associated with liberal political views. This relationship is robust to the inclusion of a rich set of individual characteristics, including two proxy measures for expected future earnings.;I estimate the effect of education on socialization and religiosity using two alternative data sources. I provide evidence that individuals with strong religious background are more likely to stay longer in school. This suggests a potential problem of endogeneity in previous estimates of the role of education on religiosity. I estimate a Fixed Effect model, and complement the results using variation in state schooling laws as instruments for years of schooling. The results of my econometric analysis show that, contrary to the observed positive correlation of education and religiosity, the actual causal effect of education on religiosity is negative. I also find that education increases the returns of social participation.