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,...

Following a landmark ruling by the Constitutional Court in 2005, more than half of Germany's universities started charging tuition fees, which also applied to incumbent students. We exploit this unusual lack of grandfathering together with register data covering the universe of students to show...

This paper examines systematic inequalities in the match between students and the university degree they apply to, and enroll in. Using linked administrative data on the population of Portuguese applicants we create a transparent and continuous measure of student-to-degree match employing...

Launched in 2004, the Carolina Covenant combines grant-heavy financial aid with an array of non-financial supports for low-income students at an elite public university. We find that the program increased four-year graduation rates by about 8 percentage points for eligible students in the...

This paper examines the financial value over the course of a lifetime of pursuing a college degree under a variety of different settings (e.g. major, student loan debt, individual ability). Using a lifecycle simulation approach, I account for ability/selection bias and the substantial...

A concern in higher education policy is that students are taking longer to graduate. One possible reason for this observation is an increase in off-campus labor market participation among college students. Financial aid may play a role in the labor/study choice of college students-as college...

This paper exploits student-level administrative data on the population of Italian university students from 2006 to 2014 to analyze the effects of high performing (HP) male or female peers on individual academic performance, according to the gender of the student. The identification strategy is...

We analyse the effects of a national student finance reform in the Netherlands, which replaced universal subsidies for higher education students by low-interest loans. We show that this reform had a large impact on education choices of secondary school students, lowering their enrolments in...

How have changes in the costs of enrolling full-time at public two- and four-year colleges affected student decisions about whether and where to enroll in college? Using local differences in the growth of tuition at community colleges and public four-year colleges we study the impact of public...

We study the impact of higher education financing on the academic aspirations of teenagers and of their parents. We exploit a reform which introduced a large increase in the maximum university tuition fees and a more redistributive student loan system, both of which varied across the UK's...