Academic Specialization Time and Career Switches -- Malamud Working Paper  

 Among the  new working papers at NBER  is  this interesting paper  by  Ofer Malamud , an education economist at Chicago's Harris School.  

 Malamud is interested in the relative benefits of specializing early or late in one's academic career: specializing early presumably allows you to accumulate more skill in your specialization, but it also probably results in a less optimal match between the individual and the specialization. In the new working paper, he compares the rate of switching careers between graduates of English and Scottish universities, who have similar educational backgrounds and enter a fairly integrated labor market but are required to specialize at different points in their educational careers: students in English universities typically must choose a specialization before entering the school, while students in Scottish universities typically specialize after two years of general education. 

 Malamud does sensible things to address possible differences between the two groups of students and the labor markets they entered, and his placebo tests effectively validate the design. (For example, to confirm that the students attending English and Scottish universities don't have a basically different propensity to switch careers, he shows similar switching rates between students receiving  graduate  degrees in English vs Scottish universities.) Ultimately he finds that switching is lower among Scottish university graduates (about 6 percentage points lower, where the mean rate of switching is about 42%), which he takes as confirmation that students are better off in their chosen field when they have a longer time to pick the field (and thus achieve a better match), even if it means they have less time to develop specific skills in that field. 

 Among working papers I've seen recently, I thought this one was unusually good in applying reasonable identification to a genuinely interesting substantive question.