Choice of electives and future leadership: Evidence from business school students

Using detailed educational data on graduates from Copenhagen Business School (CBS), this paper uses within-master's program variation in course selection and performance to model the relationship between detailed educational characteristics and labor market outcomes, which we measure by both the probability of attaining a leadership role and hourly wages. We find that choosing courses in management is a significant predictor of leadership and that individuals who have diversified curricula with many different types of classical business school courses are more likely to attain leadership roles. By contrast, we find that educational diversification outside classical business school courses is insignificant in our model. Consistent with previous findings, we also observe that particularly finance and accounting courses are significantly associated with higher wage outcomes. Finally, we observe a strong gender effect when modeling the selection of course types.