Do Reforms Aimed at Reducing Time to Graduation Work? Evidence from the Italian Higher Education System

Davide Malacrino, Samuel Nocito and Raffaele Saggio

No 11979, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of a reform aimed at expediting graduation times in Italian universities by reducing the number of exams students must pass to obtain the fixed number of credits required to graduate. Using event-study estimates that leverage the reform's staggered implementation, we find that this policy change led to an increase in on-time graduation rates but also resulted in a decreased probability of employment one-year post-graduation. However, this negative effect reverses into a positive one in the medium run. We show that these patterns are explained by students using the time gained from earlier graduation to pursue additional educational qualifications in the year following graduation.

Keywords: higher education; policy evaluation; time to graduation; labor outcomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I26 I28 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11979.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11979

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().