The Timing of Signaling: Study in High School or in College?

American students study harder in college than in high school while East Asian students study harder in high school than in college. This paper proposes a signaling explanation for this puzzle and provides its empirical evidence. The theory has three components. First, signaling may occur over time both in high school and college. Second, societies may di¤er when the signaling takes place, and students work harder in the signaling stage determined by the society as a whole. Third, the signaling stage is more likely to be high school if alumni network is more important for job performances. A testable implication of the theory is that high ability workers in East Asia are relatively more concentrated among a few top colleges as compared with their US counterparts. This implication is con…rmed by college distribution data on largest …rm CEOs in US and Korea. Keywords: Education, Signaling, Many Signals, Education Production, International Comparison. JEL Classi…cation: I21, I28, J22, J24. Address: Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, 2053 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2; E-mail: [email protected]. I am deeply indebted to Thomas Holmes for the encouragement and guidance. I also thank Andrea Moro, Zvi Eckstein, Samuel Kortum, James Schmitz, Hwikwon Ham, Oksana Leukhina, Sunghwan Kim, Alice Schoonbroodt, and participants at applied microeconomics workshop and midwest economic theory conference for valuable comments. Any remaining errors are mine. 1