Do Reforms Aimed at Reducing Time to Graduation Work? Evidence from the Italian Higher Education System

This paper examines the impact of a reform aimed at expediting graduation times in Italian universities by reducing the number of exams students must pass to obtain a fixed number of credits. Using event-study estimates that leverage the reform's staggered implementation, we find that this policy change led to an increase in on-time graduation rates. However, it also resulted in a decreased probability of employment one-year post-graduation. This negative effect vanishes in the medium run, suggesting that the reform's compliers--students who managed to graduate on time under the new regime but would have been delayed in the pre-reform regime--might have engaged in less intensive job search efforts immediately after graduation