This paper studies whether universities should select their students only using specialised subject-specific tests or based on a broader set of skills and knowledge. I show that even if broader skills are not improving graduates' outcomes in the labour market, the university chooses to use them...

How can colleges find successful applicants? Criteria such as GPA, interviews, essays, and tests provide information about candidates, but which work and why? We shed light on these questions using unique data on the universe of objective and subjective rankings of all college applicants in...

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...

This paper provides estimates of the impact of higher education qualifications on the earnings of graduates in the UK by subject studied. We use data from the recent UK Labour Force Surveys which provide a sufficiently large sample to consider the effects of the subject studied, class of first...

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...

This paper evaluates the effects of a high school curriculum reform on students' probability to enroll at university and to choose Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) as college major. The reform that was introduced in one German state increased the degree of difficulty to...

We investigate the labour market determinants and outcomes of adult participation in formal education (lifelong learning) in Australia, a country with high levels of adult education. Employing longitudinal data and fixed effects methods allows identification of effects on outcomes free of...

We examine the causal impact of China's higher education expansion on labor market outcomes for young college graduates using China's 2005 1% Population Sample Survey. Exploiting variation in the expansion of university spots across provinces and high school cohorts and applying a...

This paper determines the ranking of the publications units of assessment which were submitted to the UK research evaluation carried out in 2014, the REF, which would have been obtained if their submission had been evaluated with the bibliometric algorithm used by the Italian evaluation agency,...

We use the UK's 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) to study which attributes characterize a top-scoring (four-star) publication in Economics and Econometrics. We frame the analysis as a classification problem and, using information in official documents, derive conditions to infer the...