Many large universities require freshman to live in dormitories on the basis that living on campus leads to better classroom performance and lower drop out incidence. Large universities also provide a number of academic services in dormitories such as tutoring and student organizations that encourage an environment condusive to learning. A survey was administered to college students at a large state school to determine what impact dormitory living has on student performance. We use a handful of instrumental variable strategies to account for the possibly endogenous decision to live on campus. We nd a robust result across model specications and estimation techniques that on average, living on campus increases GPA by between 0.19 to 0.97. That is, the estimate for the degree of improvement to student performance caused by living on campus ranges between one-fth to one full letter grade.

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<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-justify: inter-ideograph; text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt; tab-stops: center 240.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 10pt; mso-no-proof: yes;">In a recent study, de Araujo and Murray (2010) find empirical evidence that living on campus leads to improved student performance, finding both immediate effects (GPA improves while the student lives on campus) and permanent effects (GPA remains higher even after moving off campus). Using the same dataset, we extend the analysis to explain why students that live on campus perform better. We examine two possible channels. First, we examine whether on-campus students are more likely to take advantage of university provided resources (libraries, tutors, computer technology, university sponsored extracurricular activities, etc) than off-campus students. Secondly, we examine peer influences and interactions, including collaborative studying with friends and/or classmates and engagement in drug and alcohol consumption. For both these channels, we look for evidence of immediate and permanent effects. We find significant peer-effect channels that explain the positive permanent effect of academic performance from living on campus, and find two channels that explain why students should immediately perform better while they live on campus, but the evidence does not point to utilization of university resources.</span></p>

This paper aims to better understand the relationship between HIV knowledge and media exposure in India. We use a two-stage hurdle model to estimate the effect of media sources such as newspapers, radios and television on AIDS-related knowledge among Indian men and women using demographic health survey data. Overall, access to newspapers, radio, or television increases the likelihood of better HIV knowledge in both males and females by an order between 2% and 12%. These findings, albeit quantitatively small, suggest, even if indirectly, possible problems faced by AIDS campaigns and government programs in combating the HIV epidemic in India.

Using data from the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS-3), this paper analyzes the socioeconomic correlates of sexual behavior, HIV/AIDS knowledge and stigma in India. The main ndings are that, overall, the Indian population is faithful and abstains from sex with very small variations across socioeconomic classes. However, given the large size of the population, there is still room for some concern as condom use is low, knowledge about the disease is poor, and stigma is high; specially with respect to less educated, poorer, single males and women in general. Obvious policy recommendations are; therefore, to increase condom distribution and awareness, increase very heavily HIV/AIDS basic education, and promote women empowerment with respect to sexual choices.