TY  - JOUR
AU  - Nicholson,Sean
AU  - Souleles,Nicholas S.
TI  - Physician Income Expectations and Specialty Choice
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8536
PY  - 2001
Y2  - October 2001
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8536
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8536.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Sean Nicholson
Professor
Department of Policy Analysis and Management
Cornell University
102 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
Tel: 607/254-6498
Fax: 607/255-4071
E-Mail: sn243@cornell.edu

Nicholas S. Souleles
Finance Department
The Wharton School
2300 SH-DH
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA  19104-6367
Tel: 215/898-9466
Fax: 215/898-6200
E-Mail: souleles@wharton.upenn.edu
AB  - In spite of the important role of income expectations in economics, economists know little about how people actually form these expectations. We use a unique data set that contains the explicit income expectations of medical students over a 25-year time period to examine how students form income expectations. We examine whether students condition their expectations on their own ability, contemporaneous physician income, and the ex post income of physicians in their medical school cohort. We then test whether a model that uses the students' explicit income expectations to predict their specialty choices has a better fit than a model that assumes income expectations are formed statically, and a model that bases income expectations on ex post income.
ER  -