This paper examines the distributional impacts of direct college costs - that is, whether the response of educational decisions to college costs varies by student characteristics. The primary obstacle in estimating these effects is the endogeneity of schooling costs. To overcome this issue, I...

I study the size and sources of the monetary return to college achievement as measured by cumulative Grade Point Average (GPA). I first present evidence that the return to achievement is large and statistically significant. I find, however, that this masks variation in the return across...

I study the size and sources of the monetary return to college achievement as measured by cumulative Grade Point Average (GPA). I rst present evidence that the return to achievement is large and statistically signi cant. I nd, however, that this masks variation in the return across dierent...

This paper examines the distributional impacts of direct college costs { that is, whether the response of educational decisions to college costs varies by student characteristics. The primary obstacle in estimating these eects is the endogeneity of schooling costs. To overcome this issue, I use...

We estimate the impact of schooling on monthly earnings from 1950 to 2000 in Romania. Nearly constant at about 3-4 percent during the socialist period, the coefficient on schooling in a conventional earnings regression rises steadily during the 1990s, reaching 8.5 percent by 2000. Our analysis...

In 2001, the Swedish system of student aid for college students was substantially re-formed; the grant-share of the total aid was increased, students were allowed to earn more without a reduction in student aid, and the repayment schedule of the loans was significantly tightened. In this paper, we...

This paper studies effects of education policy on early fertility. We study a major edu-cational reform in Sweden in which vocational tracks in upper secondary school were prolonged from two to three years and the curricula were made more academic. Our identification strategy takes advantage of...

This paper evaluates average educational performance effects of an expanding independentschool sector at the compulsory level by assessing a radical voucher reform that was implemented in Sweden in 1992. Starting from a situation where all public schools were essentially local monopolists, the...

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to financial incentives and, in particular, it is an attempt to identify the causal impact of a wage loss on the prevalence of corruption in the education sector. Specifically, we exploit the unexpected wage cut in May 2010 that affected all...

Recent studies have found a large earnings premium to attending a more selective college, but the mechanisms underlying this premium have received little attention and remain unclear. In order to shed light on this question, I develop a multidimensional signaling model relying on college grades...