Higher Education and Its Effect on Political Participation: Evidence from Egypt (Job Market Paper)
Abstract:
Higher education plays a significant role in both monetary and social or non-monetary benefits; for instance, education can foster a robust democracy by encouraging political engagement and other forms of political participation. Although the role of government spending on higher education has been studied before, very few studies emphasize the political participation outcomes, especially evidence from a developing authoritarian context is very limited. This study investigates the impact of increasing access to higher education in Egypt through the abolition of university fees and the large-scale construction of public universities during the 1960s on long-term political participation, as a natural experiment. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the World Values Survey, we analyze the impact by exploiting variation in birth cohorts’ exposure to reforms. We use five measures of political engagement, including political interest, electoral participation (voting), and non-electoral political activities (signing petitions, joining boycotts and lawful demonstrations). We found that this increasing access to university education significantly increased university attainment. However, the result shows heterogeneous effects across different political participation. Compared to men, women benefited less from this university expansion in terms of university education attainment; however, we observe a stronger influence on women’s political participation than on men.
Key Words: Higher education expansion, political participation, authoritarian context, gender gap
Privacy preservation and efficiency in a buyer-seller network: The case of spectrum sharing
Abstract:
Radio spectrum is a finite resource with increasing demand due to its wide range of usage in different applications such as mobile phones and IoT devices. Spectrum can be used more efficiently if licensed primary users share their unused spectrum with secondary users. Typically, these types of sharing trades require user’s location information; protecting user privacy is crucial to prevent market manipulation and unlawful activities. A model is presented where primary users offer a price to linked secondary users for trading unused spectrum. We use a partially linked trading graph where the locations of each user define the network exogenously. The presented concept of privacy zone provides a generalized range of the user's location which hides the location information and offers privacy protection. Within this framework, we find that single-linked buyers receive offers first but must pay high prices, and that buyers may encounter two prices in equilibrium if they have larger privacy zones. Additionally, the Nash equilibrium result demonstrates that privacy protection increases the payoff of secondary users thus secondary users always prefer to choose privacy protection and primary user chooses monopoly or competitive price depending on the probability that secondary user is single linked.
Key Words: spectrum sharing, privacy protection, market price, payoff.
Does Higher Education Influence Gender Role Attitudes? Evidence From Egypt
Abstract
This paper examines whether expanding access to higher education shapes gender role attitudes, using Egypt's 1963 public university fee abolition policy, followed by large-scale university construction, as a natural experiment. Between 1963 and 1976, the Egyptian government eliminated tuition at public universities and established 15 new universities across previously underserved provinces, transforming higher education from an elite privilege into a mass system. Exploiting birth-cohort variation in exposure to this reform and using repeated cross-sectional data from the World Values Survey, we estimate the reform's effect on gender attitudes. We use ordinary least squares (OLS) to estimate the reduced-form effect of cohort-level reform exposure, and two-stage least squares (2SLS), instrumenting university attainment with this exposure, to estimate the causal effect of actual university education. We also explore this reform's impact by gender.
Keywords: Higher Education, Gender Role Attitudes, Gender norm