The arguments for refinancing the European Union’s (EU) higher education via higher tuition fees largely rest on preserving the profitability of the educational investment and offering deferred and income-contingent payments. Using income survey datasets on Belgium, Germany and the United...

The paper is part of a larger study on normative financing, an alternative scheme to the ad hoc and highly politicised budget allocation process for state universities and colleges (SUC) currently in use. Normative financing requires, among other data, per student cost benchmarks or norms for...

A wide range of financial distress has emerged in Chinese higher education sector, and this paper aims to explain it. We pointed out that soft budget constraint is the root cause of the financial distress; our main tasks are to identify the institutional causality of soft budget constraint and...

This paper is a numerical exploration of the following. Assume, in the European Union context, that decision-makers want to spend more on higher education via higher tuition fees, but also want payments to be deferred and income-contingent. There are several possible ways to achieve this. First,...

We study the relative preference for risk-sharing or risk-pooling income-contingent loans for higher education of risk-averse individuals who differ in their ability to benefit from education and inherited wealth. We then analyse the outcome of a majority vote between the two income-contingent...