The title and abstract of paper:

"The Causal Effect of Study Abroad on Students' Academic Outcomes: Evidence from Administrative Data on Erasmus Applications” (with Enkelejda Havari, Gianluca Mazzarella and Sylke Schnepf)

ERASMUS is one of the most popular programmes financed by the European Union. It offers scholarships to higher education students funding a period of study at a foreign institution. This paper provides novel evidence on the causal effect of participating in the programme on students' academic outcomes, using rich administrative data from one of the largest public universities in Italy. We rely on a fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design methodology exploiting the scholarships allocation mechanism: applications to each host institution-specific call are assigned a score and ranked, and the last student who is offered one of the available scholarships determines the cut-off score. Our results show that studying abroad with an Erasmus scholarship has on average a positive, albeit modest in magnitude, effect on the final graduation mark for undergraduate students, while it has no impact on the time to graduation. The impact on the final graduation mark is remarkably stronger for graduates in the scientific and technical fields (STEM), and for students going on Erasmus earlier in their careers, for whom we also observe a reduction in time to graduation. Finally, the positive effect on the final graduation mark appears to be driven by certainprogramme characteristics, namely lower relative quality of the foreign host institution as measured by the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities, and a longer duration of the stay abroad.