TY  - JOUR
AU  - Garibaldi,Pietro
AU  - Giavazzi,Francesco
AU  - Ichino,Andrea
AU  - Rettore,Enrico
TI  - College Cost and Time to Complete a Degree: Evidence from Tuition Discontinuities
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12863
PY  - 2007
Y2  - January 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12863
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12863.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Pietro Garibaldi
University of Torino
Collegio Carlo Alberto
Via Real Collegio, 30
10024 Moncalieri, Torino - Italy
E-Mail: pietro.garibaldi@unito.it

Francesco Giavazzi
Universita' Bocconi and IGIER
Via Guglielmo Rontgen, 1
Milan 20136
ITALY
Tel: 0039-02-5836-3304
Fax: 0039-02-5836-3302
E-Mail: francesco.giavazzi@unibocconi.it

Andrea Ichino
University of Bologna
Dipartimento di Economia
Piazza Scaravilli, 2
40126, Bologna  - Italy
E-Mail: andrea.ichino@unibo.it

Enrico Rettore
University of Padova
Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche
via Cesare Battisti 241
35121, Padova - Italy
E-Mail: enrico.rettore@stat.unipd.it
AB  - Many students enrolled in academic programs around the world take longer to obtain a degree than the normal completion time while college tuition is typically constant during the years of enrollment. In particular, it does not increase when a student remains in a program beyond the normal completion time. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design on data from Bocconi University in Italy, this paper shows that an increase of 1,000 euro in the continuation tuition reduces the probability of late graduation by at least 6.1 percentage points with respect to a benchmark average probability of 80%. We conclude suggesting that an increase in continuation tuition is efficient when effort is suboptimally supplied, for instance in the presence of public subsidies to education, congestion externalities and/or peer effects.
ER  -