Between 1960 and 1979, 93 new universities opened in Germany. Using this large tertiary education expansion, I estimate the effect of a university opening on the probability of obtaining a university degree in the local population. I exploit the geographical variation in local university access...

Following a landmark ruling by the Constitutional Court in 2005, more than half of Germany's universities started charging tuition fees, which also applied to incumbent students. We exploit this unusual lack of grandfathering together with register data covering the universe of students to show...

Following a landmark ruling by the Constitutional Court in 2005, more than half of Germany's universities started charging tuition fees, which also applied to incumbent students. We exploit this unusual lack of grandfathering together with register data covering the universe of students to show...

In 2014, the government of Colombia launched a unique meanstested and merit-based scholarship program called Ser Pilo Paga. We examine the effects of this scholarship on student performance on the country's university exit exam and other educational outcomes. Exploiting thresholds for...

This paper analyzes grading competition between instructors of elective courses when students shop for high course scores, the instructors maximize class size, and the school imposes a ceiling on mean course scores to limit grade inflation. Under this grading norm, we demonstrate that curriculum...

We investigate the short- and long-term effects of economic conditions at high-school graduation as a source of exogenous variation in the labor-market opportunities of potential college entrants. Exploiting business cycle fluctuations across birth cohorts for 28 developed countries, we find...

Using 10 years of enrollment data at four Texas public universities, this paper examines whether, to what extent, and in what ways high school attended contributes to racial and ethnic differences in college achievement. Like previous studies, we show that controlling for class rank and test...

Grade retention offers students a chance to catch up with unmastered material but also leads to less labor-market experience by delaying graduation and labor-market entry. This is the first paper to quantify this trade-off, using an exit exam cutoff of Dutch academic secondary schools, where...

Sexual violence has long been a problem on college campuses, yet federal policies to protect students have largely been ineffectual. Spurred by student grievances, the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights recently began investigating how sexual assault cases were handled at a...

We evaluate the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of alternative government education policies to encourage college completion, such as making college free and improving funding for public schooling. To do so, we construct a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with...