This paper estimates the effect of home high-speed internet on national test scores of students at age 14. We combine comprehensive information on the telecom network, administrative student records, house prices and local amenities in England in a fuzzy spatial regression discontinuity design across invisible telephone exchange catchment areas. Using this strategy, we find that increasing broadband speed by 1 Mbit/s increases test scores by 1.37 percentile ranks in the years 2005-2008. This effect is sizeable, equivalent to 5% of a standard deviation in the national score distribution, and not driven by other technological mediating factors or school characteristics.
Using a unique reform in the Spanish financial aid program, I estimate the impact of need-based grants on student achievement and dropout decisions under different intensities of academic requirements. Utilizing comprehensive administrative data from a large university, I exploit sharp discontinuities in the grant eligibility formula to identify the effect of aid on student outcomes. I find that aid eligibility has no effect on student outcomes when the academic requirements are comparable with most existing national grant schemes worldwide. In contrast, I find that need-based grants have strong positive impacts on student performance and degree completion when they are combined with more demanding academic requirements.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.