%0 Report
        %A Modena, Francesca
%A Rettore, Enrico
%A Tanzi, Giulia
        %T The Effect of Grants on University Drop-Out Rates: Evidence on the Italian Case
        %D 2020
        %8 2020 Jan
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 12886
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp12886
        %X In this paper we evaluate the impact of need-based grants on university drop-out rates in the first year of enrollment, using student-level administrative data from all Italian universities in the period 2003-2013. We exploit the fact that not all eligible students receive financial aid due to limited resources to generate a treatment and a control group. Using this partition, we estimate the average treatment effect, i.e. the average effect on low income students, controlling for a set of observable characteristics by running regressions on blocks defined on the propensity score. 
Results point towards a sizeable effect of grants in reducing dropping out from higher education: around one third of these students would have left university in the first year in absence of the grants. This evidence is robust to a variety of specifications and sample selection criteria. 
        %K student financial aid
%K university dropout
%K higher education
%K human capital
%K blocking with regression adjustment