Are federal Pell grants "appropriated" by universities through increases in tuition - consistent with what is known as the Bennett hypothesis? Based on a panel of 71 universities from 1983 to 1996, we find little evidence of the Bennett hypothesis among either public or lower-ranked private...

Financial aid programmes for students in the United States focus increasingly on academic merit, rather than financial need. There is little empirical evidence, however, on the distributional effects of merit-based aid - who benefits or responds most. We develop a bivariate probit model of the...