University at Your Doorstep: Local Human Capital Effects of Higher Education Expansion

Ylenia Brilli (), Elena Cottini, Paolo Ghinetti and Gloria Moroni
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Ylenia Brilli: Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Elena Cottini: Catholic University of the Sacred Heart
Paolo Ghinetti: University of Eastern Piedmont
Gloria Moroni: Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

No 2026: 17, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari"

Abstract: University systems in many countries expanded by establishing new institutions in areas previously lacking higher education. We study Italy's postwar university expansion, which opened the first faculties in provinces that had never hosted one. Exploiting variation in the timing of these openings across provinces and birth cohorts in an event-study design, we find that local access increased graduation rates by 3.2 percentage points on average across treated cohorts (approximately 26 percent relative to the pre-treatment mean), with a sharp discontinuity of 1.2 percentage points at the enrollment-age threshold. The effect is significant across all urbanization levels and increasing in more urbanized provinces, consistent with complementarities between university access and local labour market conditions. Women benefited disproportionately, though gender gaps in labour market outcomes narrowed by less than those in education. Spillover effects to neighbouring provinces exist but are of secondary magnitude, with the local effect approximately twice the size of the neighbour effect. At the province level, these first openings reduced educational disparities between provinces that gained a university and those that remained unserved.

Keywords: Tertiary education; Higher education expansion; Gender gap; spatial inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H55 I23 J16 J21 J24 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2026
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