The tuition fee ‘shock’: Analysing the response of first‐year students to a spatially discontinuous policy change in Germany

Using the introduction of tuition fees at G erman public universities as an exogenous shock, this paper investigates its causal impact on the enrolment and migration decision of high‐school graduates. Specifically, we conduct a quasi‐experimental analysis by exploiting the spatial and temporal variation in tuition fee regimes as a result of a Federal Constitutional Court decision. Our empirical results show that the introduction of tuition fees...