The Road to Pell is Paved with Good Intentions: The Economic Incidence of Federal Student Grant Aid
Lesley J. Turner
,
Working paper
August
2014
Turner_FedAidIncidence.pdf688.11 KB
Abstract
The federal Pell Grant Program provides billions of dollars in subsidies to low-income college students to increase affordability and access to higher education. I estimate the economic incidence of these subsidies using regression discontinuity (RD) and regression kink (RK) designs. RK estimates suggest that schools capture Pell Grant aid through price discrimination, while RD estimates imply the opposite result, that schools supplement Pell Grants with increased institutional aid.