I am highly indebted to William E. Bailey for all his assistance, innovative insights, constructive criticism of the first draft and helpful insights into the final draft.

• This paper represents a very first draft on an ongoing research project. • In it present extension (some 20 000 words), it is more a has more a book chapter format than an article one. • A simplified, but complete version of the argument and the empirical evidence can be obtained by reading sections 1-2 and 7-8 only (some 8000 words in total), oriented to newcomers into welfare state research...

* I would like to thank all the participants to a session of the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association held in New York City on 3 rd and 4 th January 1999, in which a first draft of this paper was presented. Remarks, critiques and suggestions were very useful. I am especially grateful to Lawrence Moss. Usual caveats apply.

In table 1 I report mean values of selected student characteristics that are determined prior to university attendance, separately by tracking/random assignment period and by dormitory/non-dormitory status. I report p-values from testing if these means are equal across dormitory students in the tracking and random assignment periods (column 4) and across non-dormitory students in the tracking a...

 Become a ruthless, critical editor  create multiple drafts based on thoughtful editing.  Start with an outline/list – which you should think about critically after you think you have it all down. Then revise that list to improve the logical flow, and add or remove some points.  Use your first draft to write all/any ideas you have.  The second draft should be a small part of the first draf...