Decision Regarding Aspiration, Belief, and Social Economic Status in Education and Job Market

This project is planned to consist of three parts. The first section is to understand how aspiration would affect pupils' effort in learning. Second, I plan to extend the study to a principal-agent game within a family. Then, I can discuss how gender and social economic factor would affect household investment or working decisions. Lastly, I will try to find a job market to implement the theory into field experiments.

For the first study, I aim to understand how students form their self-aspiration and its effect on learning effort and job placement. In this study, I combine and adapt past models related to aspiration, effort, and income. Furthermore, I examine (1) whether pupils use Bayesian updating to update their aspirations, (2) whether the gap between aspiration and their true type would induce satisfaction and frustration effects on putting effort into learning, (3) how the aspiration differences would affect academic outcome or further in future income.

In the preliminary result, I find people do follows the Bayesian updating but with a slightly negative bias from the theoretical prediction. The gap between aspiration indeed follows the inverse-U shape as past papers state. Within the suitable gap (slightly less than their type), it can reach the highest effort exertion and reach the optimal outcome.

This study serves SDG goals 1, 4, 8, and 10. Aspiration is a crucial component of the educational development program. Many NGOs use parents' meetings or aspiration talks as complements to the educational resources transfer to improve education quality. Yet, rare studies examine how aspiration links to effectiveness in education. Our study examines the hypothesis and gives these organizations a better guide for future fieldwork on improving their educational achievement or job placement. Moreover, understanding different background profiles may lead to distinctive aspiration effects can also help us examine how to reduce educational inequality. By using this model, we can then analyze the influence of the background or development program that can increase future achievement through aspiration.