The "Excellence Initiative" is a prestigious third-party funding program for German universities, organized as a research contest. We investigate whether universities in this program (or that prepared an application) had different trends in terms of productivity and technical efficiency than...

This paper estimates the effects on earnings of "gap years" between high school and university enrollment. The effect is estimated by means of standard earnings functions augmented to account for gap years and a rich set of control variables using administrative Swedish data. We find that...

Recent articles have rekindled discussions around the direction and relevance of US business schools. The two main viewpoints are distinct but equally critical. On one hand, business schools are considered overly focused on scientific research and having lost their connection to real world and...

Globalization has led to a vast flow of migration of workers but also of students. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the migration of individuals encompassing decisions already at the level of education. We present a unified brain drain model that incorporates the decisions of an...

Globalization has led to a vast flow of migration of workers but also of students. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the migration of individuals encompassing decisions already at the level of education. We develop a unified brain drain model that incorporates the decisions of an...

To estimate causal effects of college choice, we exploit eligibility rules for student loans in a regression discontinuity design. Loan programs induce students to pursue college degrees that are more expensive and prolonged relative to technical education. Although higher education is...

This paper sheds a new perspective on models of migration by integrating in a same structure the decisions about education and work; and by incorporating return migration with "brain waste". Brain waste is defined as the depreciation, due to migration, in the human capital acquired in the home...

Should individuals migrate before acquiring education or after? In order to analyze the optimality of the timing of migration, I develop a model of migration, which combines the two migration decisions into a unique model - decisions about where to get an education and decision about where to...

This paper uses an own built dataset on the history of universities in Italy during 1861-2010 to estimate neighbourhood effects in the local supply of higher education, and incorporate them in a welfare analysis. We implement an instrumental variables approach that exploits initial conditions in...

This paper analyzes the drivers of wage differences among college graduates who hold a degree in a different field of study. We focus on Turkey, an emerging country that is characterized by a sustained expansion of higher education. We estimate conditional wage gaps by field of study using OLS...