Academic Cost of Student Mobility
COVID-19 Restrictions as a Natural Experiment
This paper exploits the university campus closures and their reopenings in 2022 as a natural experiment to estimate how student mobility affects academic performance and whether all students had to bear the same costs. Utilizing administrative data from a public university in Germany and a difference-in-differences approach, I find a modest but increasing decline in academic performance: passed credit points fall by up to 14% and registered exams by 13% after five semesters. Additionally, the overall dropout probability decreases by 33%. The estimated effects are heterogeneous across cohorts, sex, and migration background. Moreover, the cost of student mobility increases with distance.