This paper analyzes the main uncertainty of college saving - the child’s ability - in the context of the saving with learning model. The first section develops a dynamic model combining asset accumulation and learning to explain the parents’ forward-looking saving behavior when they are...

We show that the electorate’s preferences for using tuition to finance higher education strongly depend on the design of the payment scheme. In representative surveys of the German electorate (N18,000), experimentally replacing regular upfront by deferred income-contingent payments increases...

This paper estimates the effect of heterogeneous university funding stemming from the German Excellence Initiative on a regional firm’s probability to innovate by using a multi-valued two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences model. The estimations show that funding an additional...

This paper analyzes higher education funding in Germany from a distributional perspective. For this, I first compare the quantitative importance of different funding instruments, from free tuition to subsidized health insurance for students. I show that free tuition is, by far, the most...