Student Loan Reforms for German Higher Education: Financing Tuition Fees It is generally agreed that the funding base for German universities is inadequate and perhaps the time has come for serious consideration of the imposition of non-trivial tuition charges. Against this background, this paper compares conventional and income contingent loans for financing tuition fees at German universities...

Some Remarks on the Effectiveness of Primary Education Interventions In this paper I survey the recent economics of education literature in order to identify which education policies can effectively improve the quality of primary schooling, as measured by pupil test-based achievements. Particular attention is devoted to the experience of England, a country which has made substantial investments...

Optimal Accumulation in an Endogenous Growth Setting with Human Capital This paper considers a three-overlapping-generations model of endogenous growth wherein human capital is the engine of growth. It first contrasts the laissez-faire and the optimal solutions. Three possible accumulation regimes are distinguished. Then it discusses a standard set of tax-transfer instruments that allow for dec...

Head Start and the Distribution of Long Term Education and Labor Market Outcomes* In this paper we investigate the effect of Head Start on long term education and labor market outcomes using data from the NLSY79. The contributions to the existing literature on the effectiveness of Head Start are threefold: (1) we are the first to examine distributional effects of Head Start on long term outcome...

The Impact of ‘Equal Educational Opportunity’ Funds: A Regression Discontinuity Design Many countries provide extra resources to schools serving disadvantaged pupils. We exploit a discontinuity in the assignment of such personnel subsidies in Flanders to estimate the impact on cognitive outcomes via a regression discontinuity (RD) design. Because bias can be substantial in RD designs, we includ...

The paper studies the effects of cross-country differences in human capital formation on income distributions. Our overlapping generations economy has the following features: (1) consumers are heterogenous with respect to ability and parental human capital; (2) intergenerational transfers take place via parental education and, public investments in education Þnanced by taxes (possibly, with a l...

On Educational Performance Measures Quantitative school performance measures (QPMs) are playing an ever larger role in education systems on both sides of the Atlantic. In this paper we outline the rationale for the use of such measures in education, review the literature relating to several important problems associated with their use, and argue that they nonetheless have a positive role to pla...

We analyze some characteristics of the higher education system in Argentina regarding equity and efficiency. Individuals attending the university belong to the top deciles of the income distribution and to relatively highly educated families. Almost 90% of the students in tuition-free public universities have higher than median per capita family income and almost 50% attended tuition-financed p...

Gross plasma stability can derive from plasma compressibility in the bad curvature regions of closed field line systems. In this situation magnetohydrodynamic ~MHD! theory predicts that the maximum pressure gradient that is stable is proportional to g , the ratio of specific heats. This article will examine the accuracy of the MHD prediction for electrostatic interchange modes using kinetic the...

Institutional Effects in a Simple Model of Educational Production The paper presents a model of educational production which tries to make sense of recent evidence on effects of institutional arrangements on student performance. In a simple principal-agent framework, students choose their learning effort to maximize their net benefits, while the government chooses educational spending to maximi...