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Sticky places: The effect of college on where you live
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DOI：10.1016/j.jue.2026.103843.png)
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Abstract
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Does the location of higher education institutions affect where graduates live? We use Norway’s centralized admissions system as a natural experiment to quantify the causal effect of study location on residence later in life. Leveraging students’ rankings of study programs and locations alongside GPA-based admission scores, we identify unpredictable cutoffs that create discontinuities in admission for near-identical applicants. Our analysis shows that being admitted to the preferred study location increases the likelihood of residing in the same region after graduation by 15–20 percentage points. This effect is consistent across both larger and smaller cities, highlighting the “stickiness” of educational locations.
Keywords:
college location
residence choice
higher education
causal effect
geographic stickiness
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