Student loans schemes are in operation in more than seventy countries around the world. Most loans schemes benefit from sizeable built-in government subsidies and, in addition, are subject to repayment default and administrative costs that are not passed on to student borrowers. We probe two...

This chapter compares and contrasts international experience with respect to higher education financing. The size and payment forms of tuition, and the different types and levels of public sector support, are illustrated for a large number of countries. A major aspect of the discussion concerns...

Policies need not only to be well designed to effectively address market failures, but their parameters also need to be part of agents’ information sets. This is illustrated by government student loans in the Netherlands which are intended to alleviate liquidity constraints. Despite generous...

In this paper, we show that when the government is able to transfer wealth between generations, regressive policies are no longer optimal. The optimal educational policy can be decentralized through appropriate Pigouvian taxes and credit provision, is not regressive, and provides equality of...

We study student loan behavior in the Netherlands where (i) higher education students know little about the conditions of the government's financial aid program and (ii) take-up rates are low. In a field experiment we manipulated the amount of information students have about these conditions....

Using a nationally representative sample, this paper describes the profile of student borrowing in Latvia. The paper, more specifically, explores whether higher education graduates with student loans are significantly different from graduates without student loans in Latvia. We compare two...

This paper examines the financial value over the course of a lifetime of pursuing a college degree under a variety of different settings (e.g. major, student loan debt, individual ability). Using a lifecycle simulation approach, I account for ability/selection bias and the substantial...

Remarks at the Convening on Student Loan Data Conference, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.

This paper examines the potential costs and benefits associated with a risk-sharing policy imposed on all higher education institutions. Under such a program, institutions would be required to pay for a portion of the student loans among which their students defaulted. I examine the predicted...

We completely characterize the set of second-best optimal "menus" of student-loan contracts in a simple economy with risky labour-market outcomes, adverse selection, moral hazard and risk aversion. The model combines structured student loans and an elementary optimal income-tax problem à la...