This paper surveys the theoretical approaches used in the literature to study the phenomenon of delayed graduation and university dropout. The classical human capital model does not contemplate failure, which the amended human capital model does. Delayed graduation and university dropout are two...

Providing income support to unemployed education-leavers reduces the returns to investments in education because it makes the consequences of unemployment less severe. We evaluate a two-part policy reform in Belgium to study whether conditioning the prospective entitlement to unemployment...

We use administrative panel data on about a quarter of a million students in the German state of Hesse to estimate the causal effect of class size on school tracking outcomes after elementary school. Our identification strategy relies on the quasi-random assignment of students to different class...

Gender disparities in STEM fields participation are a major cause of concern for policymakers around the world. In addition to talent misallocation, low female enrollment rates in STEM careers contribute to gender-based inequalities in earnings and wealth, given the higher average level of...

This paper examines patterns of school choice in Egypt from primary through higher education. We use a mixed-methods approach that combines survey data with qualitative in-depth interviews to explore schooling decisions. Some private and religious schools exist, but we find that in most...

We assess whether a light-touch intervention can increase socioeconomic and racial diversity in undergraduate Economics. We randomly assigned over 2,200 students a message with basic information about the Economics major; the basic message combined with an emphasis on the rewarding careers or...

A dynamic discrete choice model is set up to estimate the effects of grade retention in high school, both in the short-run (end-of-year evaluation) and in the long-run (drop-out and delay). In contrast to other evaluation approaches, this model captures essential treatment heterogeneity and...

More than two of every five students who enrolled in college in 2007 failed to graduate by 2013. Peer tutoring services offer one approach toward improving learning outcomes in higher education. We conducted a randomized controlled experiment designed to increase take-up of university tutoring...

We estimate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on hidden drop-out, a new measure indicating failure in achieving the minimum level of skills considered to be adequate for a student getting the high school diploma. We exploit the exogenous variation induced by the pandemic by comparing two...

This paper investigates whether citizenship of immigrant students in the host country influences their choice of majors, and whether these effects differ by gender. Using detailed students' data from an Italian university, combined with characteristics of the countries of origin, I examine the...