Educational outcomes in Belgium are comparable to peers but achieved at a higher cost. The public wage bill for education is higher than in peers, reflecting smaller student-to-teacher ratios and less teaching time. Yet, Belgium experiences teacher shortages. Reforms should aim at increasing the...

The upcoming Spending Review will involve some very difficult decisions on public service spending, with virtually no headroom against the government's fiscal rules. The government has set out plans for overall departmental spending to grow by about 1.2% per year in real terms between 2025-26...

A human capital model is used to examine students' willingness to borrow to pay for a college degree. We hypothesize direct costs of education and education goals to be positively associated and current income and alternative financial support to be negatively associated with willingness to...

Can public university honors programs deliver the benefits of selective undergraduate education within otherwise nonselective institutions? We evaluate the impact of admission to the Honors College at Oregon State University, a large nonselective public university. Admission to the Honors...

We design a commitment contract for college students, "Study More Tomorrow," and conduct a randomized control trial testing a model of its demand. The contract commits students to attend peer tutoring if their midterm grade falls below a prespecified threshold. The contract carries a financial...

We investigate whether increasing the education quality causes increases in economic growth allowing poorer countries to catch up. To this end, we extend Nelson-Phelps's classic paper by introducing differences in education quality (proxied by students' performance on the Program for...