Choosing a university field of study is a critical decision for young adults, often made under considerable uncertainty. This study examines how uncertainty about abilities can deter students from pursuing highly rewarding fields. Using administrative data on university entrance test scores, applications, and employment outcomes, I investigate how students’ perceptions of their abilities influence their decisions to apply to lucrative fields. Specifically, I employ a regression discontinuity design to compare students who score just above versus just below a round number on their tests, a threshold that does not affect admission but potentially impacts self-perception due to left-digit bias. The findings reveal that students who score just above the round number are significantly more likely to apply to high-reward fields, despite low chances of admission and the potential need for retesting. In the long term, I find substantial earnings gains among subgroups who increased applications to these high-earning fields after crossing the round number. These results highlight the significant returns of choosing high-earning fields not only at the admission margin, as shown by previous studies, but also at the application margin—for students uncertain about whether to apply to such fields.
Children’s mental health is the defining public health crisis of our time. There is substantial variation in pediatric mental health treatment rates across places and providers, which has raised concerns of both under- and over-treatment. Using insurance claims data for a national sample of over 8 million privately insured children, I exploit child and provider migration and switches across providers to separate variation in pediatric ADHD medication and antidepressant prescribing due to differences in primary provider prescribing intensities, regional practice environments, and child health and demand. Considering only geographic variation understates the extent of treatment variation and the role of providers in driving overall treatment variation, because there is considerable variation in practice even within small areas. Eliminating differences in primary provider prescribing intensities would reduce the variance of provider prescribing rates by 50 percent for ADHD medication prescribing and 65 percent for antidepressant prescribing. I also find suggestive evidence that higher-quality providers tend to have higher ADHD prescribing intensities but lower antidepressant prescribing intensities.