This paper examines how financial aid reform based on postsecondary institutional performance impacts student choice. Federal and state regulations often reflect concerns about the private, for-profit sector's poor employment outcomes and high loan defaults, despite the sector's possible...

We examine a new government-sponsored investment vehicle available only to individual investors, 529 college savings plans, to analyze consumers' investment behavior after a significant change in disclosures of historical investment returns and tax benefits. We find evidence that disclosures...

This paper analyzes how high-ability students respond to different indicators of university quality when applying for a university. Are some quality dimensions of a ranking, e.g. research reputation or mentoring more important than others? I estimate a random utility model using administrative...

The paper compares the quality of Italian Medical schools’ freshmen on the basis of the scores obtained in the locally conducted entry exams which are using a common national test frame. The test is quite selective (partly because of the reduced size of the intake yearly allowed): winners are...

New entrepreneurial ventures may represent a viable and effective mechanism to transform academic knowledge into regional economic growth. We test this notion for the Italian provinces between 2001 and 2006. We evaluate three outputs of academic activities: teaching, research and Intellectual...

This paper investigates how college students update their future earnings beliefs using a unique 'information' experiment: We provide college students true information about the population distribution of earnings, and observe how this information causes them to update their future earnings...

This study presents patterns of productivity change in a large set of 266 public higher education institutions (HEIs) from 7 European countries across the time period 2001-2005. We adopt consistent bootstrap estimation procedures to obtain confidence intervals for Malmquist indices of HEI...

We examine the impacts of a private need-based college financial aid program distributing grants at random among first-year Pell Grant recipients at thirteen public Wisconsin universities. The Wisconsin Scholars Grant of $3,500 per year required full-time attendance. Estimates based on four...

An entrepreneurial society refers to places where knowledge-based entrepreneurship has emerged as a driving force for economic growth, employment creation and competitiveness. In this context, entrepreneurial universities play an important role as both knowledge-producer and a disseminating...