Within the economics of higher education, there is a small but influential literature that describes and analyzes the outcomes of competitive processes on markets for higher educational services. Colleges and universities in the United States currently invest a vast amount of resources in order...

In 1990, the U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) extended the coverage of its college rankings from only the top 25 to all national universities and colleges. This paper utilizes this exogenous information shock to identify the impact of college quality information on the financial resources of...

Between 1960 and 1979, 93 new universities opened in Germany. Using this large tertiary education expansion, I estimate the effect of a university opening on the probability of obtaining a university degree in the local population. I exploit the geographical variation in local university access...

Die Neugründung und der Ausbau von Hochschulen gehören zu dem gängigen Instrumenten der regionalen Strukturpolitik. Welche Auswirkungen aber hat die Existenz einer Hochschule in ökonomischer Hinsicht tatsächlich für eine Region? Das vorliegende Paper analysiert und vergleicht die...

Higher education is in the position to save Europe by rendering a substantial contribution to sustainable economic growth. For that purpose higher education must strengthen its innovative power in entrepreneurship education and by focusing research more on societal problems, while being better...

In Finland, universities have the explicit mandate to support the transformation of high-quality knowledge into profitable business, as well as to promote the creation of new businesses and workplaces within the boundaries of their so-called third mission. This report looks at how Finnish...

This descriptive paper analyses structural characteristics of Finnish university departments (FIDs) and benchmarks them against foreign university departments from Scandinavia, the UK and the US (FODs). In the first place the study aims to reveal information on differences in department size. In...

We provide a normative analysis of endogenous student and worker mobility in the presence of diverging interests between universities and governments. Student mobility generates a university competition effect which induces them to overinvest in education, whereas worker mobility generates a...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Siegler while working at the Center for the Economics of Education of the Ifo Institute. It was completed in June 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich (LMU) in November 2014. The thesis includes...