optimal admission and scholarship decisions choosing customized marketing offers to attract a desirable mix of customers each year in the postsecondary education industry schools offer admission to nearly 3 million new students and scholarships totaling nearly 100 billion this is a large understudied targeted marketing and price discrimination problem this problem falls into a broader class of configuration utility problems cups which typically require an approach tailored to exploit the particular setting this paper provides such an approach for the admission and scholarship decisions problem the approach accounts for the key distinguishing feature of this industry schools value the average features of the matriculating students such as percent female percent from different regions of the world average test scores and average grade point average thus as in any cup the value of one object i e student cannot be separated from the composition of all of the objects other students in the enrolling class this goal of achieving a class with a desirable set of average characteristics greatly complicates the optimization problem and does not allow the application of standard approaches we develop a new approach that solves this more complex optimization problem using an empirical system to estimate each student s choice and the focal school s utility function we test the approach in a field study of an mba scholarship process and implement adjusted scholarship decisions using a holdout sample we provide evidence that the methodology can lead to improvements over current management decisions finally by comparing our solution to what management would do on its own we provide insight into how to improve management decisions in this setting

the analytics of the pricing of higher education and other services in which the customers are inputs many services provide outputs that depend partially on the customers as inputs the presence of other customers often contributes to the output experienced by each purchaser higher education is the premier example others are legion we provide a simple model that addresses the questions of competitive pricing and allocative efficiency for these types of services prices that charge customers for what they get on net output minus input from the firm both are competitive and support efficient allocations these prices internalize the apparent external effects of customers on each other few examples of such prices exist in the real world

do international students crowd out or cross subsidize americans in higher education abstract recent growth in international enrollment at u s universities has raised controversy while critics accuse international students of displacing american students university administrators have argued that they provide much needed tuition revenue this paper examines how international students impact domestic enrollment focusing on a unique boom and bust in international matriculation into u s graduate programs from 1995 to 2005 overall foreign students appear to increase domestic enrollment this positive effect is linked to cross subsidization whereby high net tuition payments from foreign students help subsidize the cost of enrolling additional domestic students

early decision and financial aid competition among need blind colleges and universities abstract this paper presents a stylized theoretical model of competition among need blind colleges and universities that implement early decision admissions under need blind admissions an applicant s financial aid status cannot affect their likelihood of admission in the model a need blind school can use early decision admissions as a screening mechanism to indirectly identify a student s ability to pay while superficially maintaining a need blind policy as a result in equilibrium non financial aid students are more likely to be admitted than financial aid students of comparable quality

higher education funding the expansion of higher education throughout the oecd and beyond is both necessary and desirable but it is costly and faces competing imperatives for public spending higher education finance is therefore salient to an extent that is not yet fully appreciated in all countries and is also immensely sensitive politically this paper sets out the core lessons for financing higher education deriving from economic theory and puts them alongside lessons from country experience the uk reforms announced in 2004 are assessed against the backdrop of those two elements a concluding section briefly maps out unfinished business

more on tax perception and labour supply the spanish case abstract we estimate the marginal tax rate perceived by married spanish males the results suggest the existence of prominent divergences between subjective perception and formal income tax rules the efficiency and welfare implications of this tax rate gap are also assessed

building the stock of college educated labor half of college students drop out without completing a degree this paper establishes a causal link between college costs and degree completion i use quasi experimental methodology to analyze two state scholarship programs the programs increase the share of the exposed population with a college degree by three percentage points with stronger effects among women a cost benefit analysis indicates that the programs are socially efficient at rates of return to schooling as low as 5 percent even with the offer of free tuition many students continue to drop out suggesting tuition costs are not the only impediment to college completion

short and long run elasticities in energy demand a cointegration approach abstract short and long run energy demand elasticities are estimated on danish annual data for 1948 1990 energy consumption the real price of energy and real gdp appear to be non stationary variables cointegration and error correction methods are therefore applied all estimated parameters have the expected signs and magnitudes and no evidence is found of a structural break in energy demand caused by the increases in real energy prices since 1973 74

student and worker mobility under university and government competition we provide a normative analysis of endogenous student and worker mobility in the presence of diverging interests between universities and governments student mobility generates a university competition effect which induces them to overinvest in education whereas worker mobility generates a free rider effect for governments who are not willing to subsidize the education of agents who will work abroad at equilibrium the free rider effect always dominates the competition effect resulting in underinvestment in human capital this inefficiency can be corrected under exogenous university budgets if a transnational transfer for mobile students is implemented with endogenous income taxation under the non cooperative equilibrium between governments the combination of the free rider effect and fiscal competition leads to underinvestment in both teaching and research furthermore the transnational transfer no longer restores efficiency instead it can reinforce fiscal competition and imposes a tradeoff between research and human capital

on energy coefficients and ratios abstract this paper examines the methodological issues of the debates surrounding the problem of measuring energy consumption and the use of the concept of energy coefficients it also investigates the brookes hypothesis of a development effect on energy consumption the results suggest that when energy consumption is appropriately measured the energy coefficients are very consistent and fall steadily from high values tending asymptotically to one

the united states higher education antitrust exemption and college enrollment this study examines the effect of the higher education antitrust exemption on enrollment of financial aid applicants at highly selective private colleges the antitrust exemption used since 2002

policy watch antitrust goes to college it may have come as a shock to many economists especially those in academia to learn that the antitrust division of the u s department of justice doj has been investigating alleged price fixing and information exchange of financial aid among 23 prestigious east coast colleges and universities these schools include the ivy overlap group mit brown columbia cornell dartmouth harvard university of pennsylvania princeton and yale and the pentagonal sisters group amherst barnard bowdoin bryn mawr colby mount holyoke middlebury smith trinity tufts vassar wesleyan and williams we have no specific knowledge concerning the possible validity of these allegations or expertise about their legality rather in this article we wish to present the potential applicability of current antitrust doctrines to colleges and their conduct and the possible defenses that they might raise to justify their actions

antitrust and higher education was there a conspiracy to restrict financial aid in 1991 the u s justice department s antitrust division accused mit and the ivy league schools of fixing prices the schools claimed that their cooperative behavior enabled them to concentrate financial aid on needy students and did not affect price we analyze the empirical determinants of tuition and find no evidence that the schools agreement raised price we also analyze the appropriate application of the antitrust laws to nonprofit institutions and conclude that in the absence of adverse price or output effects the justification for the collective action should be considered under the rule of reason

electricity consumption and economic growth a case study of china abstract this study examines the relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth in china during 1950 1980 the results show that the income elasticity of electricity consumption is significantly greater than one ranging from 2 33 to 2 72 and the electricity gdp ratio or electricity intensity has increased over time with the growth rate of 7 3 pa during 1950 1980 these results suggest that the policy makers in china should pay more attention to electricity conservation policies and structural changes in production

network externality an uncommon tragedy economists have defined network externality and have examined putative inframarginal market failures associated with it this paper distinguishes between network effects and network externalities where the latter are market failures the authors argue that while network effects are important network externalities are theoretically fragile and empirically undocumented some network externalities are merely pecuniary network ownership or transactions among network participants can internalize some network effects the type of market failure that has been associated with these externalities is a transition problem that has little to do with externality

the energy gdp relationship in developing countries empirical evidence and stability tests abstract the elasticity of energy consumption with respect to gdp is an important element in projecting energy needs in economic development this study uses cross section and pooled cross section time series data to find that the elasticity of energy consumption with respect to gdp in developing countries is in the neighbourhood of 1 35 and significantly above one over the period covered 1970 to 1976 the relationships appear to have remained stable there are significant differences between areas of the world but the differences in the elasticities between different continents are not large

elasticities science or fiction abstract apart from discrepancies in statistical data series the most frequent source of inconsistencies among elasticity estimates is the model specification and the interpretation of empirical results this paper investigates this issue and in particular highlights the misconception that elasticities can scientifically and uniquely be determined by econometric techniques however it is common knowledge that econometric methods constitute a very good tool for analysing the past thus the main message of this exercise is that in the absence of complete specification there are important trends in the elasticities themselves such trends are very crucial and need to be interpreted if elasticities are to be used for forecasting purposes

estimating the perceived tax scale within a labor supply model the swedish marginal tax scale is too complex to be known in detail by individuals this paper indicates that perceived tax scales can be estimated jointly with a labor supply equation the differe

the behavioral and distributional implications of aid for college subsidizing the cost of education is one of the most common and expensive activities of governments while primary and secondary schooling is available tuition free in the united states among post secondary students the direct cost of schooling is quite heterogeneous first tuition prices vary widely across schools during the 2000 2001 academic year college tuitions varied from zero at some community colleges to over 27 000 at ivy league institutions second institutions heavily discount these sticker prices for many students using detailed information on family finances and academic merit to engage in finely tuned price discrimination third the federal and state governments provide individual subsidies such as the pell grant and low interest stafford loan that are portable across institutions the standard model of human capital clearly predicts that such cost subsidies will raise the optimal level of schooling while the theoretical predictions are clear it is an empirical question how much a given dollar of subsidy affects behavior answering this empirical question is a challenge since eligibility for subsidies is certainly not random and in fact is likely to be correlated with many other determinants of schooling as a result estimates based on the cross sectional correlation of aid eligibility with schooling are subject to multiple sources of bias this paper examines work that has used quasi experimental methodology to isolate exogenous sources of variation in schooling costs in order to determine their effect on schooling decisions

affordability family incomes and net prices at highly selective private colleges and universities working from the financial aid records of individual students at 28 highly selective private colleges and universities we were able to calculate both the price the low income students at these schools actually pay for a year s education net of financial aid grants and how the schools differentiate net price in recognition of their students different family incomes their pricing policies

the implicit taxes from college financial aid abstract families who earn more or who heed the experts advice and save for college typically receive less financial aid the financial aid system therefore implicitly taxes both income and assets we use npsas aid award data to estimate these implicit taxes and find that at average priced colleges the marginal income tax ranges from 2 to 16 and the marginal asset levy from 8 to 26 a typical family loses aid worth about 11 000 at average priced colleges and 15 000 at expensive colleges by accumulating an extra 50 000 in assets

what s happened to the price of college quality adjusted net price indexes for four year colleges in this paper we estimate hedonic models of the consumer price of college to construct quality adjusted net price indexes for u s four year colleges where the net price of college is defined as tuition and fees minus financial aid for academic years 1990 91 to 1994 95 we find adjusting for financial aid leads to a 22 percent decline in the estimated price index for all fouryear colleges while quality adjusting the results leads to a further albeit smaller decline nevertheless public comprehensive colleges perhaps an important gateway to college for students from low income backgrounds experienced the largest net price increases

subsidies hierarchy and peers the awkward economics of higher education higher education is a business it produces and sells educational services to customers for a price and it buys inputs with which to make that product production is subject to technological constraints costs and revenues discipline decisions and determine the long run viability of a college or university but higher education is not just a business while that statement is often meant to imply that higher education is nobler than business more decent and humane in the purposes it serves it can also mean that even in economic terms higher education is in important ways simply different from a business this paper asks how well our extensive experience with commercial businesses and the microeconomic theory of firms and markets that has evolved to describe them helps in understanding the economics of higher education that experience and those insights will be used by trustees politicians administrators lawyers reporters and the public as well as by economists to understand and evaluate the behavior of colleges and universities so it is useful to ask how safe it is to use the economic analogy in the context of higher education drawing parallels between universities and firms students and customers faculty and labor markets and so on the discussion here seeks to identify the key economic features of higher education that make it different from familiar for profit industries and to ask what difference those differences make this is a stick that can be picked up from either end one approach is to start with meticulous economic theory and see how far it can be made to encompass the economic realities of higher education an excellent recent paper by rothschild and white 1995 does that in their matching model students and colleges meet

estimating the cost of justice for adjuncts a case study in university business ethics american universities rely upon a large workforce of adjunct faculty contract workers who receive low pay no benefits and no job security many news sources magazines and activists claim that adjuncts are exploited and should receive better pay and treatment this paper never affirms nor denies that adjuncts are exploited instead we show that any attempt to provide a significantly better deal faces unpleasant constraints and trade offs adjunct justice would cost universities somewhere between an additional 15 50 billion per year at most universities can provide justice for a minority of adjuncts at the expense of the majority as well as at the expense of poor students universities may indeed be exploiting adjuncts but they cannot rectify this mistake without significant moral costs

the economics of academic tenure a relational perspective abstract this analysis draws on recent work in analytical labor economics that shows the value of stable long term employment relationships tenure is conventionally portrayed as an economically wasteful institution justified if at all by its non economic value the present analysis identifies ways in which an extended probationary period followed by a lifetime guarantee of a well defined job is well adapted to features of academic work the most important of these are a the difficulty of monitoring faculty work performance and the highly specific character of b faculty jobs and c the training those jobs require the probation tenure system is contrasted with term contracting case studies support the theoretical inferences about the drawbacks of term contracting in an academic setting

risky higher education and subsidies abstract tertiary education in the u s requires large investments that are risky lumpy and well timed tertiary education is also heavily subsidized our model suggests that despite adverse selection arising from encouraging poorly prepared students to enroll observed collegiate subsidies improve outcomes substantially relative to the fully decentralized case this result occurs because increases in subsidy rates for college education generate reductions in college failure risk without altering mean returns we find that this mechanism is robust and that tertiary subsidy rates well in excess of those observed in the u s can be justified by failure risk alone

progressive taxation in a tournament economy abstract not enough is known about the responsiveness of individuals in particular those who work under different incentives to changes in marginal tax rates we ask whether changes in tax rates are less distortionary for workers engaged in a contest to examine this potential rationale for a more progressive tax code we first model the effort decisions of workers faced with progressive taxation under tournaments and piece rates because of the difficulty identifying any distortion that may be induced by the tax code in naturally occurring data we then report on the results of a real effort experiment based on this model consistent with a behavioral approach to public finance we find that competitive tournament workers are less sensitive and hint in our discussion at the possible welfare benefits of progressive taxation in tournament economies

efficient tuition fees and examinations we assume that students observe only a private noisy signal of their ability and that universities can condition admission decisions on the results of noisy tests if the university observes a private signal of each student s ability which is soft information then asymmetries of information are two sided and the optimal admission policy involves a mix of pricing and pre entry selection based on the university s private information in contrast if all test results are public knowledge then there is no sorting on the basis of test scores tuition alone does the job of implementing an optimal degree of student self selection these results do not depend on the existence of peer effects the optimal tuition follows a classic marginal social cost pricing rule jel d82 h42 i22 j24

cohort crowding how resources affect collegiate attainment abstract analyses of college attainment typically focus on factors affecting enrollment demand including the financial attractiveness of a college education and the availability of financial aid while implicitly assuming that resources available per student on the supply side of the market are elastically supplied the higher education market in the united states is dominated by public and non profit production and colleges and universities receive considerable subsidies from state federal and private sources because consumers pay only a fraction of the cost of production changes in demand are unlikely to be accommodated fully by colleges and universities without commensurate increases in non tuition revenue for this reason public investment in higher education plays a crucial role in determining the degrees produced and the supply of college educated workers to the labor market using data covering the last half of the twentieth century we find strong evidence that large cohorts within states have relatively low undergraduate degree attainment reflecting less than perfect elasticity of supply in the higher education market that large cohorts receive lower public subsidies per student in higher education explains this result indicating that resources have large effects on degree production our results suggest that reduced resources per student following from rising cohort size and lower state expenditures are likely to have significant negative effects on the supply of college educated workers entering the labor market

optimal financial aid policies for a selective university our paper provides a model of optimal financial aid policies for a selective university the model implies that the financial aid package to be offered to each category of admitted applicants depends on the elasticity of the fraction who accept offers of admission with respect to the financial aid package offered them the propensity of the category to enroll the elasticity of the category s average quality with respect to the number admitted and the relative weight the university assigns them in the utility function while the latter must be determined subjectively the former parameters are subject to empirical estimation we conclude with a study of one institution s data and illustrate how they may be estimated these estimates are then applied to illustrate what the optimal financial aid policy would be for the university

market power and price discrimination in the u s market for higher education the main purpose of this paper is to estimate an equilibrium model of private and public school competition that can generate realistic pricing patterns for private universities in the u s we show that the parameters of the model are identified and can be estimated using a semi parametric estimator given data from the npsas we find substantial price discrimination within colleges we estimate that a 10 000 increase in family income increases tuition at private schools by on average 210 to 510 a one standard deviation increase in ability decreases tuition by approximately 920 to 1 960 depending on the selectivity of the college discounts for minority students range between 110 and 5 750

could do better the effectiveness of incentives and competition in schools this paper studies the eects of incentive mechanisms and of the competitive environment on the interaction between schools and stu dents in a set up where their eort aects the students educational attainment we show that increasing the power of the incentive scheme and the eectiveness of competition may have the counterintuitive ef fect of lowering the students attainment in a simple dynamic set up where the reputation of the schools aects recruitment we show that increased competition leads to segregation of pupils by ability

background risk and university endowment funds abstract this paper tests the effect of background risk on university endowment portfolios where background risk is defined as the volatility of universities nonfinancial income the results show that higher background risk is associated with lower portfolio standard deviations universities with higher background risk invest significantly more in fixed income and less in alternative assets a 1 standard deviation increase in background risk increases the allocation to fixed income by approximately 15 relative to the mean there is also evidence that wealthier highly selective universities hold riskier portfolios

multi dimensional skills specialization and oligopolistic competition in higher education abstract this paper develops a differentiated products model of school competition that distinguishes among different dimensions that matter in the skill acquisition process the model predicts that when identical schools compete for students specialization may arise as a competition strategy this serves rich students education goals well poorer students however may attend schools with specializations that do not cater to their relative strengths by doing so these poorer students complement the weaknesses of the richer students through peer effects and receive financial aid in return the empirical analysis provides strong support for the model s predictions about within school implications of specialization

old school ties financial aid coordination and the governance of higher education abstract this paper analyzes the role of financial aid coordination among the group of top northeastern colleges and universities known as the overlap group members of the overlap group met annually to tailor financial aid packages so that the out of the pocket contribution of parents to their children s education was the same regardless of the school the students chose to attend i argue that the practices and stability of the overlap group are difficult to reconcile with traditional cartel theory and that financial aid coordination was a solution to organizational problems encountered in the education industry particularly to matching and externality problems arising in the allocation of elite students among educational institutions

energy output ratios and sectoral energy use the case of southeast asian countries abstract the relation between energy consumption and output is studied for six developing economies in southeast asia the changing structure of energy demands by consuming sectors and the effects of this on energy output ratios are analysed it is found that the commercial energy output ratio increased for most of the period between 1960 and 1982 the five factors responsible for the increasing ratio of commercial energy to output ratio were the rising share of industrial output in gdp the substitution of commercial for non commercial fuels the strong demand for transportation energy use the rise in electricity demand in the household commercial sector and the expansion of the energy conversion industries there were systematic variations in the composition of energy uses by sectors both over time and across countries the basic features observed at a sectoral level also support the validity of the five factors mentioned above

the determinants of donative revenue flows from alumni of higher education an empirical inquiry institutions of higher education are increasingly relying upon alumni giving and endowment earnings as sources of funding this paper utilizes a new database on average alumni donations at the institutional level and institutional characteristics to explore the role that lagged institutional characteristics and policy have on subsequent donations to the institution our results confirm the noncontemporaneous effects of variations in the average scholastic achievement of matriculated students a proxy for both student quality and student socioeconomic status on subsequent donative revenue flows and indirectly address some of the open questions left by previous theoretical inquiries

estimating the effect of financial aid offers on college enrollment a regression discontinuity approach an important problem faced by colleges and universities that of evaluating the effect of their financial aid offers on student enrollment decisions is complicated by the likely endogeneity of the aid offer variable in a student enrollment equation this article shows how discontinuities in an east coast college s aid assignment rule can be exploited to obtain credible estimates of the aid effect without having to rely on arbitrary exclusion restrictions and functional form assumptions semiparametric estimates based on a regression discontinuity rd approach affirm the importance of financial aid as an effective instrument in competing with other colleges for students

adam smith goes to college an economist becomes an academic administrator the author asks whether it is useful to view universities in a utility maximizing framework and shows that university organizing virtually guarantees that the utility maximizing model is the incorrect approach he then discusses resource allocation issues at cornell and reflects upon how concepts that are obvious to economists helped or hindered decision making at cornell the author hopes to convey not that economic concepts are irrelevant in operating a university but rather that it takes a long time to explain to all the actors in the system why these concepts should matter and even longer to actually make them matter

energy consumption and economic activity in industrialized countries the dynamic aggregate time series relationship abstract most econometric studies suggest that the income elasticity of demand for energy is approximately unity for the developed market economies it is shown that over the period 1950 1978 the long run income elasticity is substantially higher than unity in terms of a ces energy demand function this result reflects the application of a generalized dynamic estimation methodology where serial correlation is regarded as a diagnostic guide to distributed lag fitting price elasticities are also estimated but these are in line with conventional estimates

new estimates of economies of scale and scope in higher education 1 introductionthe substantially greater than inflation increases in college tuition during the late 1980s and first half of the 1990s ignited considerable discussion of the costs of higher education by both academics and nonacademics the general discussion covered such issues as how much tuition has risen why college costs so much ehrenberg 2000 the extent to which tuition fully covers costs winston 1998 nacubo 2002 and what colleges are doing to cut costs strosnider 1998 indeed concern over rapidly increasing tuition spurred congress to establish a national commission on the cost of higher education in 1997 the commission conducted a review of college costs and issued recommendations for holding costs down to economists discussion of cost cutting generally boils down to a simple question what is the efficient organization of production in a market economy competitive pressures force profit maximizing firms constantly to strive to produce more efficiently thus information about the efficient organization of production can be deduced by observing organizations that survive and prosper stigler 1958 however in the context of higher education the answer is not so simple for at least three reasons i colleges are not profit maximizing entities thus market driven pressures to minimize costs are essentially absent relatedly ii tuition prices paid by students customers do not cover the full cost of their educational experience winston 1998 and iii colleges typically produce multiple products not just undergraduate education supposing that the individuals who run institutes of higher education ihes have an interest in minimizing costs how should they structure production to achieve this that is what should they produce and how much of it should be produced should colleges specialize and produce only undergraduate education or produce multiple outputs as so many currently do should colleges be small or large in terms of student enrollments and or grant research these are complex questions in their own right for example take the question about the optimal mix of outputs to produce forgetting about the implications for revenues there are a host of related empirical issues to investigate what are the unit costs of producing different levels of only undergraduate education graduate education athletics research extension or public services what then in comparison are the unit costs of producing different levels of alternative combinations of two or more of these outputs knowing the answers to specific questions like these provides an essential foundation for informed decision making about the efficient organization of production in higher education estimating the cost of producing academic outputs is complicated by the fact that many if not most ihes produce multiple products typically the products include undergraduate and or graduate instruction and research 1 in addition to these basic outputs the state land grant institutions also produce extension services many institutions also produce public services such as medical services business assistance programs museums of various sorts theater productions and the like and of course ihes produce both intramural and extramural athletics thus for purposes of estimating unit costs it is essential to treat ihes as multiproduct firms further it seems highly likely that the production of certain outputs affects the unit cost of producing others for example production of graduate instruction requires the administrators of an ihe to hire faculty with more extensive training and ability than is required to teach at the undergraduate level doctorally qualified faculty are more expensive to hire than non doctorally qualified faculty ceteris paribus to the extent that the set of faculty providing graduate instruction and the set of faculty providing undergraduate instruction are mutually exclusive the provision of the former has no cost spillover to the latter

net wage illusion in a real effort experiment in a controlled laboratory experiment subjects had to fold letters in order to earn money while the net income per letter was the same in the three treatments the gross income varied and the tax rate was 0 25 and 50 percent although work incentives should be the same in all treatments subjects worked harder and longer when they were taxed we conclude that this is because of a net wage illusion effect the existence of this effect demonstrates that not only are the tax rate and the tax base of importance for work incentives but the perception of a tax is also important

spatial competition and the price of college i introduction over the last half century the u s higher educational system has been transformed from a collection of local independent college fiefdoms into a regionally and nationally integrated market in which universities compete for both resources and students as in hoxby 1997a concurrently duffy and goldberg 1998 contend that the most salient feature of the u s higher education market has been tuition increases that exceed both the rate of inflation and income growth combined with financial aid packages that increasingly emphasize merit over need the rising real cost of college in the midst of growing competition has become a source of considerable angst for parents university administrators and public policy analysts who are concerned that need blind admission goals are being sacrificed in favor of strategic enrollment management policies designed to attract the best and the brightest thus mcpherson and shapiro 1998 have asked if the rapidly rising cost of college begs the question of whether universities compete on price as opposed to some other metric such as reputation or resources this article is the first to empirically examine price setting practices among universities by questioning whether list tuitions i e the posted price or net tuitions i e the posted price minus financial aid of private universities respond to the geographic and qualitative proximity of competitors there are theoretical reasons to expect that the increasing integration of the higher education sector might affect tuitions particularly for selective private universities that are relatively unfettered by outside pricing constraints as discussed in bowen 1967 for example hoxby 1997b models integration as the opening of trade among autarkic colleges of varying quality trade is found to reduce the monopsony power of universities over local consumers and intensify their competition for high quality students who because they are both inputs into and consumers of a college education can improve institutional quality thus despite applicant pools well in excess of the number of enrollment slots ehrenberg 2000 has documented that most selective and well endowed institutions increasingly spend significant sums recruiting top applicants and use a combination of enrollment management tools such as merit aid early decision policies and campus amenities to lure top applicants to enroll the advent of individual college rankings further raised the enrollment management stakes by providing an easily observed quality metric as this measure has been found in monks and ehrenberg 1999 to influence a student s college choice one may anticipate that select institutions may have been afforded an ability to ramp up their list tuitions using their substantial endowments and the tuition revenue collected from the most financially able students to price discriminate in favor of needy academically able students as discussed in cook and frank 1993 ehrenberg and rizzo 2004 and hill winston and boyd 2004 nonetheless heller 2004 notes that the collective impact of such enrollment management practices in higher education as a whole is of particular policy concern because empirical evidence suggests needy students increasingly rely on non need based aid often in the form of loans to finance their college educations on the other hand a number of studies including those of allen and shen 1999 moore et al 1991 and parker and summers 1993 have documented that less selective private institutions also appear to be cognizant that their more selective competitors have greater resources and deeper applicant pools which yield greater demand elasticities for these institutions moreover as discussed in kane and orszag 2003 and rizzo 2004 less selective private institutions must increasingly ward off the potential flight of students to lower cost public institutions that have also been forced to manage enrollments in response to declining state government support

the economics of private liberal arts colleges private not for profit liberal arts colleges operate in a knotty market where consumers are both inputs and outputs and the total product is not directly observed our model explains interactions among price quantity reputation and cost the evidence suggests that these institutions alter tuition and financial aid to set price below the market clearing value reputation is more a function of expenditure per student and student quality than tradition and endowment costs depend more on student inputs and the price of faculty than that of capital scale economies occur at less selective colleges with excess capacity and a hierarchy exists among purveyors

a cross sectional analysis of energy output correlation abstract the nature of the correlation between energy consumption and output is examined based on cross sectional data for 100 countries the bias in the correlation due to the use of nominal income and to the convention adopted in measuring non commercial energy consumption is analysed it is found that when real income is used and non commercial energy consumption measured in commercial energy replacement value the cross sectional energy elasticity increases rapidly from about unity for the low income developing countries to between 1 6 and 1 8 for the high income developing countries and declines marginally thereafter in the industrial country income range the results show certain disparity on energy output ratio across countries with higher income countries consuming disproportionately more energy per unit of real output

admission tuition and financial aid policies in the market for higher education we present an equilibrium model of the market for higher education our model simultaneously predicts student selection into institutions of higher education financial aid educational expenditures and educational outcomes we show that the model gives rise to a strict hierarchy of colleges that differ by the educational quality provided to the students we also develop a new estimation procedure that exploits the observed variation in prices within colleges identification is based on variation in endowments and technology it does not rely on observed variation in potentially endogenous characteristics of colleges such as peer quality measures and expenditures we estimate the structural parameters using data collected by the national center for education statistics and aggregate data from peterson s and the national science foundation

the impact of cost on the choice of university evidence from ontario this paper provides the first canadian study of the link between cost to the student and the choice of university over the past two decades there has been a substantial increase in the differences among ontario universities in net cost defined as tuition and fees minus the expected value to an academically strong student of a guaranteed merit scholarship our estimates generally indicate no relationship between net cost and the overall share of strong applicants that a university is able to attract an increase in net cost is associated with an increase in the ratio of strong students from high income neighbourhoods to strong students from middle income and low income neighbourhoods in arts and science programs but not in commerce and engineering finally more advantaged students are more likely to attend university but merit aid is not of disproportionate benefit to those from more economically advantaged backgrounds given registration jel classification health education and welfare impact du cout sur le choix de l universite resultats pour l ontario ce texte presente la premiere etude canadienne sur le lien entre le cout pour l etudiant et le choix d une universite au cours des dernieres decennies il y a eu accroissement substantiel dans les differentiels de couts nets pour les universites de l ontario par couts net on entend les frais de scolarite et autres frais afferents moins la valeur anticipee pour un etudiant academiquement fort d une bourse au merite nos evaluations montrent qu en general il n y a pas de relation entre le cout net et la portion des bons candidats qu une universite est capable d attirer un accroissement du cout net est associea un accroissement du ratio des bons etudiants en provenance de quartiers a hauts revenus par rapport aux bons etudiants en provenance de quartiers a revenus moyens ou faibles pour les programmes en arts et en science ce n est pas le cas pour les programmes en commerce ou en genie enfin les etudiants plus avantages economiquement sont davantage susceptibles d aller a l universite mais les bourses au merite ne beneficient pas de maniere disproportionnee a ceux qui proviennent de milieux plus favorises si l on s en tient aux etudiants qui s inscrivent