Education is often regarded as a route to social mobility. For this to be the case, however, the link between family background and adult outcomes must be broken (or at least reduced) once we take account of an individual's education history. This paper focuses on individuals who have completed...

Determining the extent to which citation flows, and hence bibliometric indicators based on them, reflect some intrinsic value of scientific works is an important task made very difficult by endogeneity issues. This paper presents an approach which allows to go beyond the abundant anecdotal...

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 investigate the determinants of students' university choice, with a focus on expected monetary returns, non-pecuniary factors enjoyed at school, and financial constraints, in the Pakistani context. To mitigate the identification problem concerning the separation of preferences, expectations,...

There are some peculiarities for applying as a doctoral student in Germany. The aim of this paper is to explain the most important ones for foreign graduates considering doctoral studies in Germany. Doctoral studies are free in Germany and one can get even a paid job at the university or a...

The crisis slowed down the implementation of the Lisbon Strategy (for the EU to become the most competitive region in the world). The crisis has aggravated the divergence between the North West of Europe and Southern Europe in labor productivity imparted by the knowledge economy. At the same...

This paper applies multilevel models to Brazilian's tertiary education assessment data in order to test whether some of the factors pointed out by the literature as relevant to achievement are associated with the performance of last year engineering students in 2011. Brazil is the only country...

This paper analyses the evolution of tertiary education in Brazil from 2000 to 2012, with particular focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Administrative data are used to build indicators on the demand for courses, number of places, enrolments and graduates,...

We investigate the choice of quality, or academic content, in higher education in a two-sector model. Individuals are differentiated according to their cost of acquiring human capital. A higher academic quality increases productivity upon training, but is also associated with higher cost of...

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...