Who merits financial aid?: Massachusetts' Adams Scholarship

Who Merits Financial Aid?: Massachusetts’ Adams Scholarship

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 quasiexperimental 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 wi...

Who uses the Smoker's Quitline in Massachusetts?

Financial Aid and College Persistence

Using data from two freshmen cohorts at a public research university (N = 3,730), this study examines the relationship between loan aid and second-year enrollment persistence. Applying a counterfactual analytical framework that relies on propensity score (PS) weighing and matching to address selection bias associated with treatment status, the study estimates that loan aid exerts a significant ...

Designing State Aid Formulas: The Case of a New Formula for Distributing Municipal Aid in Massachusetts

Abstract This paper designs a new equalization‐aid formula based on fiscal gaps of local communities. Using conceptual analysis and simulations with Massachusetts data, the authors illustrate the tradeoffs that policymakers face in deciding on the policy variables in the formula and lay out several general guidelines for setting up these variables. When states are in transition to a new local a...

Multicriteria decision aid in financial management

The ®nancial decisions of an organization are usually included in the context of optimization. Concerning a longterm period, there are decisions related to the optimal allocation of funds, and decisions related to the optimal ®nancial structure. In the short-term case, the decisions are related to the optimization of stocks, cash, accounts receivable, current liabilities, etc. The ®nancial theo...