This paper investigates the effects of college tuition on student debt and human capital accumulation. We exploit data from a random sample of undergraduate students in the United States and implement a research design that instruments for tuition with relatively large changes to the tuition of...

We examine the effects of college costs on the labor supply of mothers. Exploiting changes in college costs after the roll-out of nine generous state merit aid programs from 1993 to 2004, we analyze the difference in the labor supply of mothers before and after these programs were implemented....

Using data from a Canadian field experiment on the financial barriers to higher education, we estimate the distribution of the value of financial aid for prospective students. Our results point out that a considerable share of prospective students are affected by credit constraints. We find that...

The structure and functioning of the market of higher education in the United States possess distinctive if not puzzling features such as the wide spectrum of institutional arrangements and sources of funding, stark segmentation in levels of selectivity and instructional resources, and high...

Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) are subjective measures of student satisfaction that are often used to assess teaching quality. In this paper, we show that heterogeneity in students' reporting styles challenges SET validity. Using administrative data that allow us to track all evaluations...

We evaluate the effect of performance-based scholarship programs for postsecondary students on student time use and effort and whether these effects are different for students we hypothesize may be more or less responsive to incentives. To do so, we administered a time-use survey as part of a...

In this paper we evaluate the impact of need-based grants on university drop-out rates in the first year of enrollment, using student-level administrative data from all Italian universities in the period 2003-2013. We exploit the fact that not all eligible students receive financial aid due to...

Most governments around the world offer student loans to help disadvantaged students to enroll in college to reduce the attainment gap between rich and poor. However, we know little about the consequences of these loans. The reduction of the gap depends not only on initial enrollment but also on...

Income contingent loans are an increasingly popular tool for funding higher education. These loans have desirable features, but also potentially high overall government write-offs in the long run. This latter fact has been well documented, but little is known about how those write-offs vary by...

The Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013, among others, added two years in secondary education thereby delaying entry into higher education by two years. This was expected to displace teaching and non-teaching personnel in higher education. To mitigate the impact, the law mandated the Commission...

This paper surveys the theoretical approaches used in the literature to study the phenomenon of delayed graduation and university dropout. The classical human capital model does not contemplate failure, which the amended human capital model does. Delayed graduation and university dropout are two...

This paper studies optimal education subsidies when parental transfers are unequally distributed across students and cannot be publicly observed. After documenting substantial inequality in parental transfers among US college students with similar family resources, I examine its implications for...

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 surveys the theoretical approaches used in the literature to study the phenomenon of delayed graduation and university dropout. The classical human capital model does not contemplate failure, which the amended human capital model does. Delayed graduation and university dropout are two...

We research the response of the proportion of student borrowers with ninety or more days of delinquency or in default to variables such as unemployment and the average debt per borrower after the financial crisis of 2007-2008, in the United States, using panel data of 50 states from 2008 to...

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...

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...

For-profit providers are becoming an increasingly important fixture of US higher education markets. Students who attend for-profit institutions take on more educational debt, have worse labor market outcomes, and are more likely to default than students attending similarly-selective public...