How does financial aid design affect student behavior and achievement? We first estimate the impact of a study-aid reform that caused students to work more and accumulate less debt. To quantify mechanisms and perform counterfactuals, we estimate a dynamic model of college enrollment, work, and...

Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school – socio-economic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This...

Students in some countries do far better on international achievement tests than students in other countries. Is this all due to differences in what students bring with them to school – socio-economic background, cultural factors, and the like? Or do school systems make a difference? This...

In this paper we investigate the effect of Head Start on long term education and labor market outcomes using data from the NLSY79. The contributions to the existing literature on the effectiveness of Head Start are threefold: (1) we are the first to examine distributional effects of Head Start...

This survey organizes and discusses the theoretical and empirical literature on the determinants of university student achievements. According to the theoretical framework, the decision to invest in tertiary education is a sequential process made under gradually decreasing levels of uncertainty...

Education is often promoted as the solution to poverty in the developing world. Yet, fiscal discipline has led to reductions in public spending on education. We examine the poverty impacts of a cut in public subsidies to higher education, accompanied by corresponding tax cuts, in a general...

I show how local supply changes create ripple effects in a national educational market. Admitting an applicant to a program will free up a slot to be filled at her next-best alternative. To investigate such substitution effects I re-engineer the centralized admission system of the Danish...

Elisabeth Grewenig prepared this study while she was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in March 2021 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of five distinct empirical essays that...

We study the effect of exposure to older, more experienced classroom peers resulting from the widespread use of multi-grade classes in Scottish primary schools. For identification, we exploit that a class-planning algorithm quasi-randomly assigns groups of pupils to multi-grade classes. We find...

COVID-19 is exposing the fundamentally unsound nature of successive government policies and higher education institutions. Many institutions were in a weak financial position before the pandemic and are now facing a massive cash-flow crisis. These difficulties could permanently decrease the...