We show that the electorate’s preferences for using tuition to finance higher education strongly depend on the design of the payment scheme. In representative surveys of the German electorate (N18,000), experimentally replacing regular upfront by deferred income-contingent payments increases...

To increase employee participation in training activities, the German government introduced a large-scale training voucher program in 2008 that reduces training fees by half. Based on a randomized field experiment, this paper analyzes whether providing information about the existence and the...

Public preferences for charging tuition are important for determining higher education finance. To test whether public support for tuition depends on information and design, we devise several survey experiments in representative samples of the German electorate (N19,500). The electorate is...

Higher education finance depends on the public’s preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of...

This paper examines the impact of tuition fees on graduation rates among high-school leavers. We analyse the introduction of fees in several German states in 2006-07 (around EUR 1,000 annually), using administrative microdata on all university graduates and a difference-in-differences approach....

We study the optimal design of student financial aid as a function of parental income. We derive optimal financial aid formulas in a general model. For a simple model version, we derive mild conditions on primitives under which poorer students receive more aid even without distributional...

This paper analyzes the main uncertainty of college saving - the child’s ability - in the context of the saving with learning model. The first section develops a dynamic model combining asset accumulation and learning to explain the parents’ forward-looking saving behavior when they are...

Dem vorliegenden Beitrag liegt die Forschungsfrage zugrunde, ob Studienberechtigte in Deutschland durch Studiengebühren von einem Studium abgehalten werden. Diese Fragestellung ist aus mindestens zwei Aspekten relevant: Erstens gibt es bislang nur wenige Arbeiten, die, bezogen auf die...