We analyze the reallocations of educational expenditures required to equalize opportunities, according to the theory of Roemer (1998). Using the NLSYM data set, we find that implementing an equal-opportunity policy across men of different races, by using educational finance as the instrument, and ensuring that no race received less than the average observed nationally, would require spending ni...

This paper estimates the effect of receiving a need-based grant on the performance of university students in Italy. We perform both cross-sectional (between-universities) and within-universities propensity score matching analyses in order to evaluate the effect of grants on several students’ performance indicators as first year credits, dropout, and study efficiency. The findings suggest that f...

In the face of declining state support, many universities have introduced differential pricing by undergraduate program as an alternative to across-the-board tuition increases. This practice aligns price more closely with instructional costs and students’ ability to pay postgraduation. Exploiting the staggered adoption of these policies across universities, this paper finds that differential pr...

Public Education in an Integrated Europe: Studying to Migrate and Teaching to Stay? This paper analyzes public provision of internationally applicable and country-specific education, when job opportunities available to those with internationally applicable education are uncertain. Migration provides a market insurance in case labor market opportunities in the home country are poor. An increasin...

Academics and policymakers have shown great interest in cross-national comparisons of intergenerational earnings mobility. However, producing consistent and comparable estimates of earnings mobility is not a trivial task. In most countries researchers are unable to observe earnings information for two generations. They are thus forced to rely upon imputed data instead. This paper builds upon pr...

This study examines the impact on student achievement of implementing a bundle of best practices from high-performing charter schools into lowperforming, traditional public schools in Houston, Texas, using a school-level randomized field experiment and quasi-experimental comparisons. The five practices in the bundle are increased instructional time, more effective teachers and administrators, h...

This paper creates a pseudo cohort of individuals who left school in the mid-1990s, using Labour Force Survey. The extent of l ow achievement at school amongst this group is documented, and then the impact of such low achievement on labour force status is estimated. The main focus of the paper is then to investigate to what extent unqualified school leavers can improve their labour market statu...

We evaluate the effect of the federal students’ financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates by exploiting exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in repayment regulations. Supported students had to repay the full loan after graduation from their future earnings until 1990. Thereafter, only 50 percent of the loan has become due, the other half of student aid has been ...

We study a model that integrates productive and socialization efforts with network choice and parental investments. We characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium of this game. We first show that individuals underinvest in productive and social effort, but that solving only the investment problem can exacerbate the misallocations due to network choice, to the point that it may generate an eve...

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression discontinuity design for families around the second quintile of this index, which is the program’s eligibi...