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...

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...

The number of international students worldwide has almost doubled in the last decade. In higher education systems that are partly tax-funded, a country's labour force might not be willing to subsidize the education of international students who might move away after graduation. This paper...

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...

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...

The total social benefits of college education exceed the private benefits because the government receives a share of the monetary returns in the form of income taxes. We study the policy implications of this fiscal externality in an optimal dynamic tax framework. Using a variational approach we...

We investigate the relationship between inequality and political support for public education funding in a model of endogenous fertility and school choice. Household income heterogeneity is consistent with the skewness of empirical income distributions. Inequality can drive education spending in...

We analyse how state university competition to collect resources may affect both research and the quality of teaching. By considering a set-up where two state universities behave strategically, we model their interaction with potential students as a sequential noncooperative game. We show that...

The electorates' lack of information about the extent of public spending may cause misalignments between voters' preferences and the size of government. We devise a series of representative survey experiments in Germany that randomly provide treatment groups with information on current spending...

To study whether current spending levels and public knowledge of them contribute to transatlantic differences in policy preferences, we implement parallel survey experiments in Germany and the United States. In both countries, support for increased education spending and teacher salaries falls...