Despite large and growing student loan balances, there is relatively little evidence on the effects of access to student loans on borrowing and educational outcomes. We examine the effect of access to credit by using policy variation in the maximum federal student loan amounts available to U.S....

College completion rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. We document that this trend has reversed - since the 1990s, college completion rates have increased. We investigate the reasons for the increase in college graduation rates. Collectively, student characteristics, institutional...

We estimate effects of the Pell Grant - the largest U.S. federal grant for college students - using administrative data from Texas public colleges and a discontinuity in grant generosity for low-income students. Within four-year institutions, eligibility for additional grant aid significantly...

Growing reliance on student loans and repayment difficulties have raised concerns of a student debt crisis in the United States, but little is known about the effects of student borrowing on human capital and long-run financial well-being. We use variation induced by recent expansions in federal...

Financial aid has been shown to affect student outcomes from enrollment to graduation. However, effects on graduation can be driven either by marginal students induced to enroll by financial aid, or by inframarginal students who would have enrolled anyway but received additional financial aid....

There is increasing evidence that tax credits for college do not affect college enrollment. This may be because prospective students do not know about tax benefits for credits or because the design of tax credits is not conducive to affecting educational outcomes. We focus on changing the...

Higher education has experienced many changes since the 1970s, including an increase in the price of college, an increase in student employment during college, a decrease in college completion rates, and an increase in time to degree. This paper ties these trends together by causally linking...

We estimate the effect of grant aid on poor college students' attainment and earnings using student-level administrative data from four-year public colleges in Texas. To identify these effects, we exploit a discontinuity in grant generosity as a function of family income. Eligibility for the...

Prior research suggests that gender differences in hours worked play an important role in the gender pay gap. Yet common estimates of the wage returns to hours worked are close to zero, implying that hours differences cannot account much for the gender wage gap, even though men work more hours...