Government student loan programs must balance the need to enforce repayment among borrowers who can afford to make their payments with some form of forgiveness or repayment assistance for those who cannot. Using unique survey and administrative data from the Canada Student Loan Program, we show...

In higher education pure credit market funding leads to underinvestment while income-contingent loans funding tends to produce overinvestment. We analyze whether a market structure in which both funding schemes coexist and compete against each other might restore efficiency of the educational...

This paper uses an overlapping generations framework to analyze the implications of different financing regimes in the education sector for human capital formation and economic welfare. Agents privately invest in education after they have received a noisy information signal about their...

A large fraction of domestically abused women report that their partners interfere with their participation in education and employment. As of yet, mainstream economics has not dealt in any systematic way with this phenomenon and its implications for welfare policy. This paper puts forward a...

This paper conducts a cross-national econometric analysis of intra-family location and caregiving patterns. First, we assess, from an international perspective, the relationship between family structure and the geographic proximity between adult children and their parents. We then examine...

Is unemployment the overwhelming determinant of domestic violence that many commentators expect it to be? The contribution of this paper is to examine, theoretically and empirically, how changes in unemployment affect the incidence of domestic abuse. The key theoretical prediction is that male...

In this paper we conduct a quantitative analysis of a number of stylized educational loan systems. We develop a stochastic general equilibrium model of a closed economy with a competitive firm sector and a government that levies taxes and administers educational loans. Individuals are...

The number of tertiary students enrolled outside their home country has almost doubled in the last decade. In higher education systems that are partly tax-funded, a country’s labor force might not be willing to subsidize the education of foreign students who can be expected to work abroad...

We completely characterize the set of second-best optimal “menus”of student-loan contracts in a simple economy with risky labour-market outcomes, adverse selection, moral hazard and risk aversion. The model combines structured student loans and an elementary optimal income-tax problem à la...

In January 2005 the German Supreme Court permitted the state governments to charge tuition fees. By exploiting the natural experiment, we examine how government ideology influenced the introduction of tuition fees. The results show that rightwing governments were active in introducing tuition...