Do reforms aimed at reducing time to graduation work? Evidence from the Italian higher education system

This paper examines the impact of a reform aimed at expediting graduation times in Italian universities by reducing the number of exams that students are required to pass to obtain a fixed number of credits. Using event-study estimates that leverage the reform's staggered implementation across universities and fields of study, we find that the reform led to an increase in on-time graduation rates. However, it also resulted in a decreased probability of employment one-year post-graduation. This negative effect vanishes in the medium run, suggesting that the reform's compliers---students who managed to graduate on time under the new regime but would have been delayed in the pre-reform regime---might have engaged in less intensive job search efforts immediately after graduation.