Many male and first-generation college-goers struggle in their first year of postsecondary education. Mentoring programs have been touted as a potential solution to help such students acclimate to college life, yet causal evidence on the impact of such programs, and the factors that influence...

Inequalities do not end once students enter higher education. Yet, the majority of papers on the effectiveness of education aid examine its impact on college enrolment. In this paper, we provide evidence on the causal impact of means-tested financial aid on the outcomes of students who have...

Decentralized assignments in the education market have been increasingly replaced by centralized ones. However, empirical evidence on these transitions are scarce. This paper examines the adoption of centralized admissions in the Brazilian higher education market. Using rich administrative data,...

We analyze the impact of expansion of higher education on student outcomes in the context of competition among colleges which differentiate themselves horizontally by setting curricular standards. When public or economic pressures compel less selective colleges to lower their curricular demands,...

This paper contributes to the economics of examination rules. We show how rational students reallocate their learning effort as a response to a charge for the second exam attempt, a cap on the maximum resit mark, an adjustment of the passing standard, a variation of the time span between two...

Are college dropouts successful entrepreneurs? Other than anecdotal evidence on illustrious college dropouts who managed to become self-made billionaires, there is only limited empirical evidence to answer this question. This paper addresses this issue by investigating the relationship between...

We study students' motives for educational attainment in a unique survey of 885 secondary school students in the UK. As expected, students who perceive the monetary returns to education to be higher are more likely to intend to continue in full-time education. However, the main driver is the...

This paper exploits the unexpected decline of deaths from cardiovascular diseases since the 1970s as a large positive health shock that affected predominantly old-age mortality; i.e., the fourth stage of the epidemiological transition. Using a differences-in-differences estimation strategy, we...

This paper examines the causal impact of education on within-country migration. A major higher education reform took place in Finland in the 1990s. It gradually transformed former vocational colleges into polytechnics and expanded higher education to all regions. The reform created exogenous...

In this note we use unique data from Bar-Ilan University, over a period of four years (2005-2008), to estimate simultaneous equations with regard to the relationship between publications and teaching loads. The study shows that students studying for a bachelor's degree are a liability while PhD...