It’s Time to Degree! The Impact of Reducing Barriers to Entry into Professions on Late Graduation: The Case of Pharmacists

This work evaluates to what extent the time required by students to graduate depends on labor market opportunities. Identification is achieved using a quasi-experimental setup grounded on a policy reform in Italy that eased labor market access for pharmacy graduates. The impact of the reform on the speed to graduation is investigated with a regression kink design on panel data covering the academic careers of several cohorts of graduates from a large public university. The deregulation reduced graduation time by about 8.65%. If students' entire academic careers had gone at the speed they had after the deregulation, their average duration of studies would have been about 7 months shorter.