State merit aid programs have been found to reduce the likelihood that students attend college out-of-state. Using the U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges and universities to measure college quality and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System data to measure enrollment, we...

This paper employs a unique dataset on articles, authors and editors of the top general interest journals in economics to investigate the role of social connections in the publication process. Ties between editors and authors are identified based on their academic histories. Results show that an...

Postdoc is a special transitional position for those with a doctoral degree and is usually regarded as an investment to accumulate the additional human and social capital needed to facilitate future job searches or to add to an academic reserve army of unemployed PhDs. Given the prevalence of...

The creation of spinoff companies is often promoted as a desirable mechanism for transferring knowledge and technologies from research organizations to the private sector for commercialization. In the promotion process, policymakers typically treat these “university” spinoffs like industry...

This paper traces the development of the education sector from its nascent stage of serving economic development needs to the internationalization stage of fulfilling Singapore's aspiration to be a global education hub. The state plays an important role in guiding and fostering development of...

Augmenting a Mincerian earnings function with governorate level data, this paper estimated the external return to higher education for individuals in Egypt in 2010. The results suggested that these externalities are negative and exist only for female workers, while for males these externalities...

Starting with the premise that technological innovation and economic growth are interactive and mutually reinforcing, this paper argues that in order to have a fighting chance in the Asean Economic Community (AEC), let alone global, competition, the Philippines (PH) needs to appreciably ramp up...

The NZ labour market is among the most flexible in the OECD, and outcomes for its young people have been among the best. However, labour-market opportunities are heavily determined by initial education, where New Zealand’s system is also successful and innovative in many ways. Average PISA...

Despite tremendous recent interest in the subject of student debt by both researchers and policy makers, little is known about how the distribution of college graduate debt has been evolving and what factors can explain it. We use National Postsecondary Student Aid Study data from 1990 through...

This paper estimates the effect of graduating from college on lifetime earnings. Motivated by the fact that nearly half of all college students fail to earn a bachelor's degree, we study a model of risky college completion. The central idea is that students drop out of college mainly because...