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

Davide Malacrino, Samuel Nocito and Raffaele Saggio

No 32659, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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 a fixed number of credits. 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. However, it also resulted in a decreased probability of employment one-year post-graduation. This negative effect vanishes in the medium run, suggesting that the reform's compliers—students who managed to graduate on time under the new regime but would have been delayed in the pre-reform regime—might have engaged in less intensive job search efforts immediately after graduation.

JEL-codes: I24 I26 I29 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-inv and nep-lab
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