Affirmative action in higher education may lead to mismatch, a situation where students benefiting from preferential admission struggle with their college-level work because of poor precollege academic preparation. In the United States, those students can switch majors if they underperform in...

We evaluate a natural experiment at a Swedish university, in which students were randomized to either taking all their courses online, or to have some courses online and some on campus (blended learning). Our setting creates two groups for the online courses: One group with no access to campus...

Since 2004, a complex high-stake assessment of the federal higher education system has been in operation in Brazil. Established by law, the National Higher Education Assessment System (Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Superior - Sinaes) consists of three components: the evaluation...

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...

This paper studies whether universities should select their students only using specialised subject-specific tests or based on a broader set of skills and knowledge. I show that even if broader skills are not improving graduates' outcomes in the labour market, the university chooses to use them...

We use the UK's 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) to study the attributes of top-scoring (four-star) publications in Economics and Econometrics. Although official documents contain aggregate scores for each institution, we show how these aggregates can be used to infer the score awarded...

This paper describes changes that occurred in the Brazilian tertiary education system considering information from household surveys and from administrative data collected by the Ministry of Education. A movement toward democratizing access occurred especially in public universities and in the...

This paper discusses the interruption of teaching and learning activities at Brazilian federal universities at the time the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, as well as the extent to which the lack of access to the internet would prohibit remote resumption of those activities. Political-educational...

Income contingent loans (ICLs) are a financial tool that optimizes the transactional efficiencies involved in the government monopoly in taxing personal income. It protects the borrowers against periods of low income, as instalments vary according to fluctuations in their incomes over the...

We use individual-level administrative data to examine the extent and potential explanations for the poorer academic performance of three ethnic minority groups in their first year of study at a New Zealand university. Substantial differences in course completion rates and letter grades are...