A simple Tiebout model is presented where states provide university education to both immobile and mobile students. State governments choose the quality of public universities by trading off the value of education for the local immobile student population and the costs, net of tuition revenues,...

In the 1990s polytechnic education reform took place in Finland, which gradually expanded higher education to all Finnish regions; the polytechnics constituted a new non-university sector in higher education. This reform is used to study the causal effect of education on the inter-regional...

To expand the skilled workforce, countries need to attract skilled migrants. One way of doing this is by attracting and retaining international students. Empirical evidence suggests that concerns about brain drain—that is, the emigration of highly qualified workers—are overblown and that...

This paper examines the causal impact of education on within-country migration. A major higher education reform took place in Finland in the 1990s. It gradually transformed former vocational colleges into polytechnics and expanded higher education to all regions. The reform created exogenous...

New college graduates must choose whether to stay in the geographic area where they completed their degree or move to a new location to begin their careers. This paper classifies 41 U.S. metropolitan areas as 'college towns' and investigates differences in employment outcomes between college...

Decentralized assignments in the education market have been increasingly replaced by centralized ones. However, empirical evidence on these transitions are scarce. This paper examines the adoption of centralized admissions in the Brazilian higher education market. Using rich administrative data,...

The Scottish Government's Budget for 2024-25 takes place at a time of particular uncertainty about the future funding environment. UK government spending plans both for the coming year and for later years seem likely to be topped up, but when and by how much is unclear. The current UK government...

The next government faces difficult choices on higher education funding, with tuition fees frozen and international student recruitment falling.

How much does the Scottish Government spend on higher education, and what challenges does it face on university funding and living cost support?

Using administrative data, I track the path of all the secondary school graduates in Colombia from 2002 to 2012 that enter higher education and/or the formal labor market (5.4 million graduates). I compare graduates within the same secondary school and cohorts to estimate the premium of higher...