Signals, Information, and the Value of College Names

Eble and Hu are co-first authors and contributed equally to all stages of the research. Order of authorship is alphabetical by author surname. We are grateful for generous input from many sources: the co-editor, Brian Jacob, and two anonymous referees, as well as Liz Ananat, Sandy Black, Beezer Cheble, Mingyu Chen, Sarah Cohodes, Jennifer Eggerling-Boeck, Haoran He, Prashant Loyalka, Jordan Matsudaira, Josh Merfeld, Randy Reback, Jonah Rockoff, Judy Scott-Clayton, Miguel Urquiola, Felipe Valencia, Chunbing Xing, and audience members at AEFP, the China Econ Lab, the Columbia Committee on the Economics of Education, IFPRI, the NBER Education Program Fall Meetings, NEUDC, and the University of Minnesota. This project would not be possible without the tireless work of our research managers, Yanrong Liu, Xuecun Zhao, and, particularly, Yingli Lin. Cong An, Xinyu Feng, Xuejing Hao, Zhu Li, Qian Liu, Jing Lv, Xinru Lv, Lei Pan, Hongfeng Wang, and Yuanyaun Xu all provided research assistance. Eble acknowledges support from the National Academy of Education (NAEd) and the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Hu acknowledges support from the Humanities and Social Science Fund of Ministry of Education of China (grant no. 19YJA790029).

A supplemental appendix is available online at https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01277.