Does distance matter? Tuition Fees and Enrollment of First-Year Students at German Public Universities

Georg-Benedikt Fischer, Kerstin Bruckmeier and Berthold Wigger ()

VfS Annual Conference 2013 (Duesseldorf): Competition Policy and Regulation in a Global Economic Order from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: We use the recent introduction of tuition fees at public universities in seven of the sixteen German states to identify the effects of tuition fees on university enrollment of first-year students at German public universities. Our study differs from previous research in two important ways. Firstly, we take into account the location of universities and include a spatial variable, which measures the distance between a fee-imposing university and the nearest fee-free alternative. Secondly, we use panel data that allows us to control for unobserved heterogeneity between universities. Our results suggest that enrollment at universities that impose a tuition fee and that are located close to fee-free universities experience a decrease in enrollment that is twice as large as the decrease at universities that are further away from fee-free universities. We also find gender differences in enrollment behavior. Enrollment numbers of female students at universities that are located far away from fee-free alternatives are significantly less affected by the introduction of tuition fees than are enrollment numbers of male students.

JEL-codes: H75 I22 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-geo
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Working Paper: Does Distance Matter? Tuition Fees and Enrollment of First-Year Students at German Public Universities (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc13:79813

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