the role of application assistance and information in college decisions results from the h r block fafsa experiment growing concerns about low awareness and take up rates for government support programs like college financial aid have spurred calls to simplify the application process and enhance visibility we present results from a randomized field experiment in which low income individuals receiving tax preparation help were also offered immediate assistance and a streamlined process to complete the free application for federal student aid fafsa for themselves or their children treated participants were also provided with aid estimates that were compared against tuition cost amounts for nearby colleges the combined assistance and information treatment substantially increased fafsa submissions and ultimately the likelihood of college attendance persistence and aid receipt in particular high school seniors whose parents received the treatment were 8 percentage points more likely to have completed two years of college going from 28 to 36 during the first three years following the experiment families who received aid information but no assistance with the fafsa did not experience improved outcomes the findings suggest many other opportunities for using personal assistance to increase participation in programs that require filling out forms to become eligible jel codes i2 h4 j24 copyright 2012 oxford university press

participation and study decisions in a public system of higher education we analyze the decision whether to participate and where and what to study in a public system of higher education based on a unique dataset of all eligible high school pupils in an essentially closed region flanders we find that pupils perceive the available institutions and programs as close substitutes relative to the outside option this implies an ambiguous role for travel costs they hardly affect the participation decision but have a strong impact on the decision where and what to study to illustrate how our empirical results can inform the debate on reforming public systems we assess the effects of tuition fee increases uniform cost based tuition fee increases achieve most of the welfare gains the additional gains from fee differentiation are relatively limited these welfare gains are quite large under conservative assumptions on the social cost of public funds and there is a substantial redistribution from students to outsiders copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

post secondary attendance by parental income in the u s and canada do financial aid policies explain the differences we examine the extent to which tuition and needs based aid policies explain important differences in the relationship between family income and post secondary attendance relationships between canada and the u s using data from recent cohorts we estimate substantially smaller attendance gaps by parental income in canada relative to the u s even after controlling for family background cognitive achievement and local residence fixed effects we next document that u s public tuition and financial aid policies are actually more generous to low income youth than are canadian policies equalizing these policies across canada and the u s would likely lead to a greater difference in income attendance gradients resume nous etudions les frais de scolarite et l aide financiere afin d expliquer d importantes differences entre le canada et les etats unis quant a la relation entre le revenu parental et la frequentation des etudes postsecondaires nous trouvons que les ecarts entre les taux de frequentation des jeunes adultes de differents niveaux de revenu familial sont considerablement plus faibles au canada qu aux etats unis et ce meme en tenant compte des acquis cognitifs des effets fixes residentiels et d autres caracteristiques familiales nous documentons aussi le fait que l aide financiere aux etudiants de famille a bas revenus est beaucoup plus genereuse aux etats unis qu au canada s ils avaient les memes politiques d aide financiere les differences entre les etats unis et le canada quant a la relation entre le revenu parental et les etudes postsecondaires seraient plus prononcees

educational benefits and military service an analysis of enlistment reenlistment and veterans benefit usage 1991 2005 i introduction educational benefits for military veterans have become a prime recruiting tool in the all volunteer military force avf the primary education benefit for most of the avf era has been the montgomery gi bill mgib this version of the gi bill began in july 1985 and bears the name of its sponsor alabama representative sonny montgomery under this program eligible veterans who enroll in an education program approved by the veterans administration are eligible to receive up to 36 mo of benefits if they begin usage within 10 yr of separating from service veterans are only eligible for mgib benefits if they contribute 100 per month during their first year of service 1 from time to time three of the four military branches have supplemented the basic mgib benefit with college fund cf benefits research has indicated that educational benefits do in fact attract enlistments of high quality youth defined by the military services to be youth who possess a high school degree and who score above the youth population average of 50 on the armed forces qualification test afqt 2 although educational benefits attract more highly qualified youth into the military those benefits may be costly for at least two reasons first such youth may be more likely to separate from the military to use their benefits thus requiring higher rates of recruitment of new enlistees to maintain the size and quality of the force second higher benefits may increase the tendency of youth who separate from the military to use those benefits as well as increase the duration of usage of course this would not be surprising a growing body of research finds that college tuition subsidies raise college attendance interest in the potential behavioral effects of military educational benefits was recently heightened by a vigorous debate in congress over veterans benefits this debate culminated in the post 9 11 veterans education assistance act of 2008 which was passed in july 2008 becoming effective on august 1 2009 the act provides future veterans with substantially higher educational benefits than those available through the mgib this paper analyzes how gi bill benefits affect military retention and veterans benefit usage the analysis is useful for two reasons first as our review of the literature below indicates existing studies of the retention and usage effects of military education benefits are now quite dated second prior studies have all ignored issues relating to selection as a result the estimates of retention and usage effects found in them cannot be cleanly interpreted as pure incentive effects arising from benefit changes our analysis accounts for the possibility that higher veterans education benefits may attract youth who are more likely to separate and use those benefits conditional on their observables over the period of our analysis the nominal value of gi bill benefits were set legislatively and changed unpredictably we use the unpredictable evolution of the value of veterans education benefits over our data period to disentangle selection effects and incentive effects of benefit changes on retention and benefit usage our analysis makes use of administrative data that span the period 1988 2005 and contains annual information on every individual who entered active military service from the time of entry to the time of separation or if still in service until the end of fiscal year fy 2004 as shown below this was a period during which the real value of military educational benefits fluctuated considerably for those who separated details of educational benefit usage were available to us as of june 2005 if educational benefits do affect the retention behavior of military personnel or the educational decisions of military veterans their effects should be apparent in data over this period to highlight our key findings we estimate that a 10 000 increase in mgib benefits would increase the fraction of army veterans who use them within 2 yr of separation by 5 8 percentage points

public spending on education and the incentives for student achievement we build a model where homogeneous workers can accumulate human capital by investing in education schools combine public resources and individual effort to generate productive skills if skills are imperfectly compensated then in equilibrium students may under invest in effort we examine the effect on human capital accumulation of three basic education finance policies increased tuition subsidies may not be beneficial because they increase enrolment but they may lower the incentives for student achievement hence the skill level policies directed at enhancing the productivity of education or making degrees more informative are more successful at improving educational outcomes

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

conditional cash transfers and school dropout rates this paper evaluates a united kingdom pilot study designed to test whether a means tested conditional cash transfer paid to 16 to 18 year olds for staying in full time education is an effective way of reducing the proportion of school dropouts the transfer s impact is substantial in the first year full time education participation rates increase by around 4 5 percentage points while the proportion receiving two years of education increases by around 6 7 percentage points those receiving the full payment have the largest initial increase in participation and some evidence is found suggesting that part of the effect can be explained by liquidity constraints

fairness and redistribution comment we provide an example that shows that in the alesina and angeletos 2005 model one can obtain multiplicity even if luck plays no role in the economy thus it is not critical that the noise to signal ratio be increasing in taxes or that desired taxes are increasing in the noise to signal ratio

sales growth of spanish tourist firms some implications of gibrat s law on marketing management abstract the research presented in this paper is targeted towards empirical validation of three hypotheses deduced from gibrat s law and concerning sales growth in the spanish tourism industry the research refers to the years 1997 2000 and uses a sample of 1131 surviving firms all of which are devoted to tourism activities regression correlation and automatic interaction detection techniques were used throughout the sample the results show the existence of two firm growth segments set apart by a threshold size reached only when initial size is measured in sales terms firms above the threshold size grow at a significantly lower accumulated rate than firms below it thus contradicting gibrat s law however no relationship was observed for successive inter annual growth rates this in turn suggests that marketing actions and programmes have rather a medium and long term effect than a short term effect over sales growth sound implications about the firms degree of market opportunity management strategic interdependence and market orientation were deduced from these results

educational opportunity and income inequality affordable higher education is and has been a key element of social policy in the united states with broad bipartisan support financial aid has substantially increased the number of people who complete university generally thought to be a good thing we show however that making education more affordable can increase income inequality the mechanism that drives our results is a combination of credit constraints and the signaling role of education first explored by spence 1973 when borrowing for education is difficult lack of a college education could mean that one is either of low ability or of high ability but with low financial resources when government programs make borrowing easier or tuition more affordable high ability persons become educated and leave the uneducated pool driving down the wage for unskilled workers and raising the skill premium

assessing the effect of educational programs on public schools performance this paper provides evidence on the effectiveness in the implementation of an educational program which offered public schools in catalonia spain the opportunity to improve the quality of educati

does aid matter measuring the effect of student aid on college attendance and completion does student aid increase college attendance or simply subsidize costs for infra marginal students settling the question empirically is a challenge because aid is correlated with many characteristics that influence educational investment decisions a shift in financial aid policy that affects some youth but not others can provide an identifying source of variation in aid in 1982 congress eliminated the social security student benefit program which at its peak provided grants totaling 3 7 billion a year to one out of ten college students using the death of a parent as a proxy for social security beneficiary status i find that offering 1 000 1998 of grant aid increases educational attainment by about 0 16 years and the probability of attending college by four percentage points the elasticities of attendance and completed years of college with respect to schooling costs are 0 7 to 0 8 the evidence suggests that aid has a threshold effect a student who has crossed the hurdle of college entry with the assistance of aid is more likely to continue schooling later in life than one who has never attempted college this is consistent with a model in which there are fixed costs of college entry finally a cost benefit analysis indicates that the aid program examined by this paper was a cost effective use of government resources this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

investing in schooling in chile the role of information about financial aid for higher education we investigate the impacts of providing low income chilean adolescents with information about how to finance higher education and ask whether providing parents with the same information magnifies the effects on schooling outcomes we randomly assigned eighth graders and some parents to receive information about aid for higher education exposure to information raised college preparatory high school enrollment primary school attendance and financial aid knowledge with gains concentrated among medium and high grade students parental exposure to information did not significantly magnify these effects our results demonstrate that access to relevant information about financial aid affects important schooling choices long before tertiary education begins

multifaceted aid for low income students and college outcomes evidence from north carolina we study the evolution of a campus based aid program for low income students that began with grant heavy financial aid and later added a suite of nonfinancial supports we find little to no evidence that program eligibility during the early years 2004 2006 in which students received additional institutional grant aid and few nonfinancial supports improved postsecondary progress performance or completion in contrast program eligible students in more recent cohorts 2007 2010 when the program supplemented grant heavy aid with an array of nonfinancial supports were more likely to meet credit accumulation benchmarks toward timely graduation and earned higher grade point averages than their barely ineligible counterparts jel i21 i23 i24 j08

accounting for the changing role of family income in determining college entry in this paper i analyze the determinants of college enrolment and the changes in these determinants over time i propose a quantitative life cycle model with college enrolment altruistic parents provide financial support to their children using counterfactual experiments i find that 24 percent of all households are financially constrained in their college decision constraints become more severe over time i show that my model is consistent with a narrow college enrolment gap between students from rich and poor families as previously reported in the empirical literature the estimation of enrolment gaps is a popular reduced form approach for measuring the fraction of constrained households my results suggest that these reduced form estimates are misleading and that a structural model of parental transfers is needed to correctly identify constrained households further i show that parental transfers are an important driver behind the changing role of family income as a determinant of college entry a fact that is well documented for the us economy

financial student aid and enrollment in higher education new evidence from germany means tested student aid might affect enrollment in higher education to derive the potential influence of student aid we use a tax benefit microsimulation model the effect is a non linear function of parental income with variation as a result of bracket creeping and various reforms therefore the effect of student aid on enrollment can be separated from the effects of income and other family characteristics using the german socio economic panel we find a small but significant positive effect similar in size to the effects reported in previous studies for european countries but smaller than in the us

the effects of the 2006 tuition fee reform and the great recession on university student dropout behaviour in the uk abstract this paper investigates the causal effect of the great recession and a conditional effect of a tuition fee reform on the risk of students dropping out of he we use hesa data and our analysis combines duration modelling with difference in differences we find that the causal effect of the recession increases the risk of drop out especially for males a smaller and positive effect of the tuition fee reform for males whereas we observe the opposite effect for females differences in dropout behaviour are also found for high and low income groups and between different types of university and subjects studied

skill biased technical change and the cost of higher education we document the growth in higher education costs and tuition over the past 50 years to explain these trends we develop a general equilibrium model with skill and sector biased technical change finding the model s parameters through a combination of estimation and calibration we show that it can explain the rise in college costs between 1961 and 2009 along with the increase in college attainment and the change in the relative earnings of college graduates the model predicts that if college costs had ceased to grow after 1961 enrollment in 2010 would have been 3 6 higher

the incidence of mandated maternity benefits i consider the labor market effects of mandates which raise the costs of employing a demographically identifiable group the efficiency of these policies will be largely dependent on the extent to which their costs are shifted to group specific wages i study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans raising the relative cost of insuring women of childbearing age i find substantial shifting of the costs of these mandates to the wages of the targeted group correspondingly i find little effect on total labor input for that group jel 118 j32 h51 in an era of tight fiscal budget constraints mandating employer provision of workplace benefits to employees is an attractive means for a government to finance its policy agenda consequently in recent years there has been a growth of interest in mandated benefits as a tool of social policy for example the centerpiece of president bill clinton s health care proposal is mandated employer provision of health insurance and more than 20 states have man

on the optimal provision of social insurance progressive taxation versus education subsidies in general equilibrium in this paper we compute the optimal tax and education policy transition in an economy where progressive taxes provide social insurance against idiosyncratic wage risk but distort the education decision of households optimally chosen tertiary education subsidies mitigate these distortions we highlight the quantitative importance of general equilibrium feedback effects from policies to relative wages of skilled and unskilled workers subsidizing higher education increases the share of workers with a college degree thereby reducing the college wage premium which has important redistributive benefits we also argue that a full characterization of the transition path is crucial for policy evaluation we find that optimal education policies are always characterized by generous tuition subsidies but the optimal degree of income tax progressivity depends crucially on whether transitional costs of policies are explicitly taken into account and how strongly the college premium responds to policy changes in general equilibrium

tuition fees and sunk cost effects this article reports on a field experiment testing for sunk cost effects in an education setting students signing up for extra curricular tutorial sessions randomly received a discount on the tuition fee the sunk cost effect predicts that students who pay more will attend more tutorial sessions with possibly beneficial effects on their performance for our full sample we find no support for this hypothesis neither on attendance nor on performance results are consistent with a sunk cost effect for the subsample of students who based on hypothetical survey questions are identified as sunk cost prone we do not find differential effects by students income or parental contributions

tuition fees and equality of university enrolment abstract the relationship between tuition fee changes and the university enrolment of youth by parental income group in canada is investigated comparisons between youth from canadian provinces that increased tuition fees sharply in the 1990s and youth from provinces that instituted fee freezes were integral to identifying the relationship tuition fee increases coincided with reductions in the university enrolment of low income youth but with significantly smaller changes in the university enrolment of other youth the relationships between government funding of universities and cohort size and university enrolments are also analyzed

educational inequality and public policy preferences evidence from representative survey experiments abstract to study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the german population providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational inequality it also affects support for equity oriented education policies which have high baseline support although effects are quantitatively small on average however instrumental variable estimates suggest substantial effects of concerns on policy preferences among the compliers whose concerns are shifted by the information treatment there are substantial effects on support for compulsory preschool which increases further if respondents are informed about policy effectiveness

integrity versus access the effect of federal financial aid availability on postsecondary enrollment abstract it is generally believed that access to financial aid will increase the likelihood that students will attend and graduate from college there is a surprising lack of research however on the consequences when postsecondary institutions lose eligibility to disburse financial aid this paper provides among the first causal estimates of institution level financial aid funding loss on enrollment and composition of student bodies i implement a dynamic regression discontinuity design using a multi year rule that restricts institutions eligibility to offer federal aid such as pell grants and subsidized loans when alumni s loan repayment rates are below allowed thresholds results suggest that financial aid loss discourages enrollment at for profit institutions and institutions that offer programs of two years or less the decline in enrollment appears to be driven by fewer new enrollees particularly at for profit colleges i find less conclusive evidence that ineligibility to disburse federal financial aid substantially alters student body composition this research is particularly relevant considering recently proposed federal rulemaking that will further limit the number of institutions eligible to disburse financial aid based on additional student loan debt repayment requirements restrictions such as these are intended to protect students and the integrity of federal aid programs but may also have implications for access to higher education

longitudinal analyses of the effects of trade unions but union members are different from nonmembers in unobserved ways biasing your estimates y ou should make a selectivity bias correction simultaneously determine union status and economic outcomes develop an unobservables model use longitudinal data archetypical comment on virtually any study of the economic effects of umomsm or suitably modified on any other empirical subject

who merits financial aid massachusetts adams scholarship abstract most states now fund merit based financial aid programs the effects of which depend on how strongly students react to changes in college costs i estimate such reactions using quasi experimental aspects of a recent massachusetts merit scholarship program intended to attract talented students to the state s public colleges despite its small monetary value the adams scholarship induced 6 of winners to choose four year public colleges instead of four year private colleges suggesting an elasticity of demand for public college enrollment above unity nonetheless most funds flowed to students who would have enrolled in public colleges absent the scholarship and the aid had no effect on winners overall college enrollment rate which already exceeded 90 regression discontinuity estimates are larger than those from difference in difference specifications because winners with relatively low academic skill and thus nearest the treatment threshold reacted much more strongly to the price change than did highly skilled winners conditional on academic skill low income winners reacted similarly to their higher income peers suggesting that previous research may have mistaken income heterogeneity for skill heterogeneity

college entry by blacks since 1970 the role of college costs family background and the returns to education college enrollment of black 18 19 year old high school graduates declined from 1980 through 1984 and then rebounded after 1984 this paper presents data from a time series of cross sections of 18 19 year old youths from 1973 through 1988 to test the role of family background direct college costs local economic conditions and returns to college in driving these trends the evidence suggests that on the one hand increases in direct college costs were driving enrollment rates downward throughout the eighties on the other hand dramatic increases in average parental education for black youths exerted upward pressure on college enrollment by blacks particularly in the latter half of the decade the net effect of these two factors contributed to the pattern of decline and recovery observed during the eighties

the effect of the availability of student credit on tuition testing the bennett hypothesis using evidence from a large scale student loan program in brazil we test whether the availability of student loans increases tuition costs the bennet hypothesis starting in 2010 there was a major ramp up in the fies a student loan program funded by the brazilian federal government fies s rules for eligibility produce a marked heterogeneity in the access to funding in different higher education institutions we take advantage of these rules and of an unique dataset with information on tuition costs at the major college level and document two facts using a difference in differences approach we show that relaxing access to student loans caused an increase in tuition fees we also estimate a structural model of demand and show that relaxing credit constraints reduces the demand price elasticity thus the mechanism behind the increase in tuition costs is an increased tuition insensitivity at least in part duarte belafduarte gmail com de mello joaompm insper we are very grateful to hoper educacao for kindly sharing their proprietory data we also thank luis braido leonardo rezende and seminar participants at eaesp fgv for useful comments all errors are ours

more is more or more is less parental financial investments during college evidence shows that parental financial investments increase college attendance but we know little about how these investments shape postsecondary achievement two theoretical frameworks suggest diametric conclusions some studies operate from a more is more perspective in which children use calculated parental allocations to make academic progress in contrast a more is less perspective rooted in a different model of rational behavior suggests that parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement i adjudicate between these frameworks using data from nationally representative postsecondary datasets to determine what effect financial parental investments have on student gpa and degree completion the findings suggest seemingly contradictory processes parental aid decreases student gpa but it increases the odds of graduating net of explanatory variables and accounting for alternative funding rather than strategically using resources in accordance with parental goals or maximizing