This paper analyses political forces that cause an initial expansion of public spending on higher education and an ensuing decline in subsidies. Growing public expenditures increase the future size of the higher income class and thus boost future demand for education. This demand shift implies...

Despite the importance of the Bologna process for the mobility of students, and the further mobility of graduates, as well as for peace, growth and welfare in that area, nothing has been decided so far for the financing of internationally mobile students, so that the burden of that financing,...

We study voting over higher education finance in an economy with risk averse households who are heterogeneous in income. We compare four different systems and analyse voters' choices among them: a traditional subsidy scheme, a pure loan scheme, income contingent loans and graduate taxes. Using...

We study voting over higher education finance in an economy with two regions and two separated labor markets. Households differ in their financial endowment and their children's ability. Non-students are immobile. Students decide where to study; they return home after graduation with exogenous...

We investigate externalities in higher education enrollment over the course of development in a two-sector model. Each sector works with only one type of labor, skilled or unskilled, and individuals are differentiated according to their cost of acquiring human capital. Both sectors exhibit...

Public preferences for charging tuition are important for determining higher education finance. To test whether public support for tuition depends on information and design, we devise several survey experiments in representative samples of the German electorate (N19,500). The electorate is...

Higher education finance depends on the public’s preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of...

We study within-family spillovers in college enrollment to show college-going behavior is transmissible between peers. Because siblings' test scores are weakly correlated, we exploit college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings' college options....

In recent years, many countries have experienced a significant expansion of higher education enrolment. There is a particular interest among policy makers for further growth in STEM subjects, which could lead to larger classes in these fields. This study estimates the effect of class size on...

This paper studies whether specialized academic fields of study in secondary school, which are common in many countries, affect earnings as an adult. Identification is challenging, because it requires not just quasi-random variation into fields of study, but also an accounting of individuals'...