We estimate the elasticity of enrollment into higher education with respect to the amount of means tested student aid (BAfoeG) provided by the federal government using the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP). Potential student aid is derived on the basis of a detailed tax-benefit microsimulation...

It is generally agreed that the funding base for German universities is inadequate and perhaps the time has come for serious consideration of the imposition of non-trivial tuition charges. Against this background, this paper compares conventional and income contingent loans for financing tuition...

We present evidence from an experiment in which groups select a leader to compete against the leaders of other groups in a real-effort task that they have all performed in the past. We find that women are selected much less often as leaders than is suggested by their individual past performance....

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 provides evidence of heterogeneity in the returns to higher education in the UK. Attending the most prestigious universities leads to a wage premium of up to 6% for males. The rise in participation in higher education also led to a greater sorting of students and an increase in the...

The relationship between family income and post-secondary participation is studied in order to determine the extent to which higher education in Canada has increasingly become the domain of students from well-to-do families. An analysis of two separate data sets suggests that individuals from...

In this paper, we estimate the rate of return to first degrees, masters degrees and PhDs in Britain using data from the Labour Force Survey. We estimate returns to broad subject groups and more narrowly defined disciplines, distinguishing returns by gender and attempting to control for...

The paper takes advantage of exceptionally rich longitudinal data on the universe of labor force participants in Slovenia and simulates the working of an income contingent loan scheme to partly recover tuition costs. The simulations show that under the base variant (where the target cost...

We estimate selection and sorting effects on the evolution of the private return to schooling for college graduates during China?s between 1988 and 2002. We pay special attention to the changing role of sorting by ability versus budget-constraint effects as China?s education policy has changed...