Merit requirements in need-based student aid may exacerbate inequality in higher education but at the same time improve efficiency of aid expenditure by increasing on-time graduation, for instance. Disentangling the effect of the two building blocks of student aid ("need" and "merit") is...

In this paper, we investigate the effects of competition on the performance of Italian secondary schools as measured by Maths achievement scores (PISA 2006 dataset). Competition is measured by an indicator of ‘perceived’ competition (generated from an answer provided by the schools’...