Paolo Ghinetti (University of Eastern Piedmont)
Elena Cottini, Gloria Moroni and Ylenia Brilli
University systems in many countries expanded by establishing new institutions in areas previously lacking higher education. We study Italys 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. At the province level, these first openings narrowed educational disparities between provinces that gained a university and those that remained unserved.