We estimate the causal effect of exposure to math during high school on university major choice and performance, using a unique administrative dataset of 1,396 twins extracted from the entire student population enrolled between 2011 and 2021 at an Italian university. We apply a Twin Fixed Effect...

University students' smartphone use has recently been shown to negatively affect their academic performance. Surprisingly, research testing the empirical validity of potential mechanisms underlying this relationship is very limited. In particular, indirect effects of negative health consequences...

We study whether living in a student room as a tertiary education student (instead of commuting between one's parental residence and college or university) affects exam results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study this relationship beyond cross-sectional analysis. That is, we...

We exploit the variation in admission cutoffs across colleges at a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on cognitive attainment, economic preferences, and Big Five personality traits. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that...

Starting in 1999, the Bologna Process reformed the German five-year study system for a first degree into the three-year bachelor's (BA) system to harmonize study lengths in Europe and improve competitiveness. This reform unintentionally challenged the German apprenticeship system that offers...

The wage effect of overeducation has only recently been investigated in the case of Ph.D. holders. The existing contributions rely on OLS estimates that allow measuring the average effect of being educationally mismatched at the mean of the conditional wage distribution. This paper, instead,...

This survey organizes and discusses the theoretical and empirical literature on the determinants of university student achievements. According to the theoretical framework, the decision to invest in tertiary education is a sequential process made under gradually decreasing levels of uncertainty...

Given asymmetric information, this paper explores the need for non-tenure-track jobs in academia alongside the usual tenure-track positions. It also explains the coexistence of these two types of jobs in research universities as an equilibrium phenomenon. The increased e¤ort needed to produce...

This paper contributes to the literature on overeducation by empirically investigating the wage penalty of job-education mismatch among Ph.D. holders who completed their studies in Italy; a country where the number of new doctoral recipients has dramatically increased over recent years while...

This paper analyzes the drivers of wage differences among college graduates who hold a degree in a different field of study. We focus on Turkey, an emerging country that is characterized by a sustained expansion of higher education. We estimate conditional wage gaps by field of study using OLS...