In this paper we present estimates of roommate and institution based peer effects. Using data from the College & Beyond survey, the Freshman survey, and phonebook data that allows us to identify college roommates - we estimate models of students' political persuasion and intellectual engagement....

The market for undergraduate education has many similarities to an arms race. A school's position - relative to other schools - determines its success in attracting students and student quality. Its position, in turn, is largely determined by the size of its student subsidies, the difference...

A study was conducted to see whether peer effects could be observed among undergraduates at Williams College, an elite four-year liberal arts school. Specifically, the study explored whether students in the bottom third of their class, with average SAT's of about 1300, would perform better in...

It is increasingly clear that price competition is escalating in the market for higher education. We attempt to understand how price competition would work in higher education and explore the likely long run equilibrium structure of prices in that context. We draw inferences using both...

All of the financial aid decisions at Williams College for the past fourteen years - nearly 14,000 of them - were used to see how much students actually paid for tuition, room, board, and fees to go to that highly selective and expensive school - their net prices. Williams practices need blind...

Because the rewards of academic performance in college are often delayed, the delay-discounting model of impulsiveness (Ainslie, 1975) predicts that academic performance should tend to decrease as people place less weight on future outcomes. To test this hypothesis, we estimated (hyperbolic)...

A study was conducted to examine peer effects among undergraduates at Williams College, a highly selective four-year liberal arts school. Specifically, the study explored whether students would perform better writing about newspaper articles they read and discussed in academically homogeneous or...

This paper studies the role of the expansion of higher education supply in increasing the equality of post-secondary education opportunities. It examines Italy�s experience during the 1990s, when policy changes prompted universities to offer a wider range of degree courses and to open new...

We analyse how the labour market implicitly evaluates Italy's higher education system by estimating differences in employment and earnings across universities. We use our estimates to produce three rankings of universities based, respectively, on employment, earnings and employment-weighted...

This paper estimates the impact of university teachers on their students� academic achievement and labor market outcomes using administrative data from Bocconi University matched with Italian tax records. The estimation exploits the random allocation of students to teachers in a fixed...