Many urban school districts in the United States and OECD countries confront the necessity of closing schools due to declining enrollments. To address this important policy question, we formulate a sequential game where a superintendent is tasked with closing down a certain percentage of student...

At the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the students' freshmen and senior year. This outcome could suggest that affirmative action policies are playing a key role to reduce racial differences. However, this convergence...

This paper considers a fundamental question about the school environment - what are the long run effects of a student's ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data from all public school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third grade academic rank,...

This paper considers a fundamental question about the school environment - what are the long run effects of a student’s ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data from all public school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third grade academic rank,...

This paper considers a fundamental question about the school environment - what are the long run effects of a student's ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data from all public school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third grade academic rank,...

At the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the students’ freshmen and senior year. This outcome could suggest that affirmative action policies are playing a key role to reduce racial differences. However, this convergence...

This study attempts to estimate pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns to college education for academically marginal students in Korea. The Korean government limits the number of admission slots at each college by assigning a binding quota for each year. An increase in the quota admits more...

Social interactions have been shown to affect peoples' behavior in many settings. Yet little is known about their role in shaping higher education choices. We exploit discontinuous admission rules generated by Chile's centralized system of admission to postsecondary education to study spillovers...

39% of parents consider distance learning as holidays. Nearly half of students (49%) share the same point of view. Moreover, 62% of students and 56% of their families do not consider that the online format can be considered as a full-fledged alternative to live classroom studies, which was...

Franziska Bernadette Hampf prepared this study while she was working at the ifo Center for the Economics of Education. The study was completed in September 2019 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical...