Over the last decade and a half, the Australian Universities have been subjected to a series of reforms introduced by the Australian Commonwealth Government. This paper discusses these reforms, subsequent policy changes, and their impact on the Australian university system. I will argue that the...

Incentives are widely used to increase people's effort and thus performance. Whileacademic achievement depends heavily on effort, there is little empirical evidence onhow students respond to incentives other than grades and monetary rewards. We drawon two natural experiments that occurred at a...

This volume was prepared by Susanne Link during her stay at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and the Department of Human Capital and Innovation of the Ifo Institute of Economic Research. It was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Economics Departure of the University of Munich in...

We examine the dramatic expansion in the Turkish higher education system during 2006-2008, which resulted in the establishment of 41 new public universities and a 60% increase in the number of available slots. Using the variation in the exposure intensity of expansion across cohorts and regions,...

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 volume was prepared by Susanne Link during her stay at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich and the Department of Human Capital and Innovation of the Ifo Institute of Economic Research. It was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Economics Departure of the University of Munich in...

This paper analyzes professors' effect from a fundamental first-year course in Economics on students' later performance in follow-on courses with a special attention given to the problem of self-selection bias of students toward certain professors. Based on an extensive dataset consisting of...

In recent years, many countries have experienced a significant expansion of higher education enrolment. There is a particular interest among policy makers for further growth in STEM subjects, which could lead to larger classes in these fields. This study estimates the effect of class size on...