Brunello, Giorgio, Claudio Lucifora, and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer. 2004. "The Wage Expectations of European Business and Economics Students." Journal of Human Resources 39(4): 1116-1142.

Expected earnings and expected returns to education are seen by labor economists as a major determinant of educational attainment. In spite of this, the empirical knowledge about expectations and their formation is scarce. In this paper we report the results of the first systematic study of the wage expectations of European university students. Our data are based on a uniform questionnaire answered by about 3,000 business and economics university students across Europe. We study the determinants of wage expectations and expected employment probabilities, the variability of these expectations and their variation across countries and universities. We also examine the tradeoff between expected starting wages and expected wage growth.

Giorgio Brunello is a professor of economics at the University of Padova, affiliated with CESifo and IZA. Claudio Lucifora is a professor of economics at the Università Cattolica, Milan. Rudolf Winter-Ebmer is a professor of economics at the University of Linz, affiliated with CEPR, IZA, and IHS. The authors are grateful to G. Bono, J. Fersterer, M. Maurhart and N. Pakhomova for excellent research assistance; to M. Arai, R. Asplund, J. Bacher, C. Badelt, R. Böheim, J. Brüderl, W. Buchholz, M. Burda, D. Checchi, K. Denny, B. Fitzenberger, K. Gerlach, H. Karcher, P. Ordine, P. Pereira, A. Skalli, P. Tsakloglou, V. Ulrich, P. Welzel, N. Westergard-Nielsen, S. Wolter, R. Wright and J. Zweimüller for help in administrating the survey in the different countries; to Julian Betts, George Bresson, Bernard Fortin, Fumio Hayashi, Andrea Ichino, Enrico Rettore, Peter Zweifel and seminar participants at the New Orleans Meeting of the AEA, the ESPE Conference in Athens, the AFSE Conference in Lyon, Australian National University, Zürich, Tokyo, ERMES-Paris2 and European University Institute for comments. Two anonymous referees proved particularly valuable in shaping the quality and clarity of the paper and we have to thank them for their effort. This research was supported by the European Commission under the TSER program PL980182 for the PuRE project. The usual disclaimer applies. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning May 2005 through April 2008 from Rudolf Winter-Ebmer, University of Linz, Austria, rudolf.winterebmer@jku.at.