Widening access to higher education remains a significant policy challenge. While meeting student intake targets in university admissions is notoriously difficult, additionally pursuing access targets makes universities’ decision problem even more complicated. We introduce a choice procedure,...

In Turkey, as in many other countries, female students perform better in high school and have higher test scores than males. Nevertheless, men still predominate at highly selective programs that lead to high-paying careers. The gender gap at elite schools is particularly puzzling because college...

In a centralized marketplace that was designed to be simple, we identify participants whose choices are dominated. Using administrative data from Hungary, we show that college applicants make obvious mistakes: they forgo the free opportunity to receive a tuition waiver worth thousands of...

We use administrative data from Ireland to study differences in college application behavior between students from disadvantaged versus advantaged high schools. Ireland provides an interesting laboratory for this analysis as applicants provide a preference-ordering of college programs (majors)...

Without a school degree, students can have difficulty in the labor market. To improve the lives of upper-secondary school dropouts, German states instituted a school reform that awarded an interim degree to high-track students upon completion of Grade 9. Using retrospective spell data on school...

To investigate the effects of reducing the intensity of tracking, this study exploits reforms across German states which combined the two lower secondary school tracks, sometimes additionally offering the possibility to acquire a university entrance qualification. Using a...

This study aims to identify the main determinants of student performance in reading and maths across eight European Union countries (Austria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, and Slovenia). Based on student-level data from the OECD’s PISA 2018 survey and by means of the...

We investigate the educational choices of first- and second-generation immigrantstudents at the transition between lower-secondary school and high school byexploiting a large longitudinal dataset of about 50,000 students in Italy. We findthat immigrant students are less likely to choose...

We use administrative data from Ireland to study differences in college application behavior between students from disadvantaged versus advantaged high schools. Ireland provides an interesting laboratory for this analysis as applicants provide a preference-ordering of college programs (majors)...