TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Modena, Francesca
AU  - Rettore, Enrico
AU  - Tanzi, Giulia
        TI  - The Effect of Grants on University Drop-Out Rates: Evidence on the Italian Case
        PY  - 2020/Jan/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 12886
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp12886
        AB  - 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. 
        KW  - student financial aid
KW  - university dropout
KW  - higher education
KW  - human capital
KW  - blocking with regression adjustment
        ER  -