We study the impact of a student's ordinal rank in a high-school cohort on educational attainment several years later. To identify a causal effect, we compare multiple cohorts within the same school, exploiting exogenous variation in cohort composition. We nd that a student's ordinal rank in...

This study investigates how exposure to an academic field influences students major choices. In particular, we analyze whether students who are inclined to study business change their intentions after being exposed to economics or law. We exploit a natural experiment at a Swiss university. All...

The challenges posed by globalization have led to a rapid increase in the demand for higher education and, at the same time, many countries are earmarking more resources and efforts to foster their population's skills level and knowledge. Nowadays higher education is playing a crucial role in...

Knowledge flows from universities to the regional economy can take different forms ranging from formal research collaborations to consultancy and informal personal connections. One of the knowledge communication channels drawing substantial interest of both researchers and regional policy makers...

There have been numerous studies of the "impact" of HEIs on their host regions. These have typically focused on the demand for goods and services in the host region. The best of these studies employ regional input-output analyses. However, there has developed a "policy scepticism" about the...

The presence of universities in a region has been found to be an important factor for regional economic growth. In search for the specific explanations of this phenomenon, the connection between universities and locally based entrepreneurship has attracted considerable attention. We investigate...

The influence of tertiary education on the economic development of a region is a topic of special interest and prevalent object of studies and discussions of regional economists. Universities are frequently referred to as 'creative hubs'. Researching universities are generally expected to be one...

We raise the issue of how appropriately to attribute economic impact to consumption expenditures. Despite the salience of the topic for applied economics it has not received much explicit attention in recent literature. In Input-Output analysis consumption expenditures are either treated as...

This work attempts to examine how the global financial crisis has affected the education sector and more specifically, universities. So our paper examines the universities public funding especially in Europe, the mobility of teaching staff, students etc. Also the impact of the financial crisis...

The influence of higher education institutions on regional economic and social development is a topic of special interest and prevalent object of studies and discussions in regional sciences. Generally, universities are considered to be key actors in regional innovations systems, as they offer...