Online Appendices for “The Effects of Alignment of Educational Expectations and Occupational Aspirations on Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from NLSY79”
by Soobin Kim, Christopher Klager, and Barbara Schneider

A. Family Background and Alignment
It is possible that our findings are driven by over-alignment students' coming from wealthier backgrounds and better outcomes may not be the result of being over-aligned but by coming from higher income families with more educated parents. Thus we tested the concern about the extent to which family background affects alignment status. To do this, we added interaction terms between alignment measures and family characteristics such as parental education and family income. Results are summarized in Online Appendix Tables 1 and 2. Online Appendix Table 1 indicates that family characteristics do not affect individual’s educational attainment if they are over-aligned. Online Appendix Table 2 provides only limited evidence that external family characteristics interplay with over-alignment status. For example, over-aligned individuals have no differences in log wages or number of weeks worked when interacted with family characteristics. Out of eight estimated interaction coefficients for over-aligned individuals, only two coefficients are statistically significant. Among over-aligned young adults, family income only affects hourly wages and parental education is only related to occupation prestige. 

B. Alignment or Higher Educational Expectation
Results indicate that having high educational expectations, whether aligned or not, appeared to be beneficial in the labor market, with the returns being most apparent in ones 30s and into ones 40s. We conducted additional analyses to examine whether it is higher educational expectations that drove the positive outcomes. As the commonality between over-aligned and high-aligned is that they both contain students with high educational expectations, we focused on individuals who have higher educational expectations (i.e., having college or above) and re-estimated equation (2). Results in Online Appendix Table 3 indicate that, when we take into account occupational aspirations as well, these two groups exhibit different labor market trajectories. In particular, over-aligned individuals are predicted to have higher wages and more prestigious occupations, whereas outcomes for high-aligned individuals are not statistically different from those of under-aligned individuals. Therefore, we argue that this paper is about the alignment of educational expectations and occupational aspirations rather than simply a study of educational expectations.