The structure and functioning of the market of higher education in the United States possess distinctive if not puzzling features such as the wide spectrum of institutional arrangements and sources of funding, stark segmentation in levels of selectivity and instructional resources, and high...

I take advantage of a sharp discontinuity in the probability of admission to an elite university at the admission score threshold, to estimate causal returns to college education quality. I use a newly constructed dataset, which combines individual administrative records about high school,...

We investigate the choice of quality, or academic content, in higher education in a two-sector model. Individuals are differentiated according to their cost of acquiring human capital. A higher academic quality increases productivity upon training, but is also associated with higher cost of...

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 many countries there is a considerable gender gap in enrolment for a bachelor's degree in Economics, arguably an important stepping stone towards positions of influence in policy making and occupations paying relatively high wages. We investigate the sources of this gap by looking in detail...

Since the 1980s the United States has faced growing disinterest and high attrition from STEM majors. Over the same period, foreign-born enrollment in U.S. higher education has increased steadily. This paper examines whether foreign-born peers affect the likelihood American college students...

We study the role of professional networks in facilitating the escape of persecuted academics from Nazi Germany. From 1933, the Nazi regime started to dismiss academics of Jewish origin from their positions. The timing of dismissals created individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of...

Iron Curtain and Big Data are two words usually used to denote completely two different eras. Yet, the context the former offers and the rich data source the latter provides, enable the causal identification of the effect of networks on migration. Academics in countries behind the Iron Curtain...

According to conventional wisdom, multinational firms undertake vertical FDI in order to take advantage of cross-border factor cost differences and source the inputs from abroad at better terms. Recent empirical findings though document that this is not always the case. We provide theoretical...