This paper presents an analysis of the determinant of school participation in rural north India, based on a recent household survey which includes detailed information on school characteristics. School participation especially among girls, responds to a wide range of variables, including...

Tournaments are designed to enhance participants’ effort and productivity. However, ranking near the top may increase psychological pressure and reduce performance. We empirically study the impact of interim rank on performance using data from international diving tournaments. We find that...

This paper uses data on a sample of Australian teenagers to test for neighbourhood effects on school dropout rates. The data allows us to test for neighbourhood effects at two different spatial scales. We find that educational composition of the larger neighbourhood can influence the dropout...

We study the effect of a large set of department characteristics on individual publication records. We control for many individual time-varying characteristics, individual fixed-effects and reverse causality. Department characteristics have an explanatory power that can be as high as that of...

Many large listed firms offer workers the opportunity to buy shares in the firm at discounted rates through employee stock purchase plans (ESPP). The discounted rate creates a gift exchange, where the firm hopes that workers who accept the gift reciprocate with greater loyalty and effort. But...

We analyze the impact of interim ranking on the risk taking and performance behaviour of professional athletes participating in international weightlifting competitions. Weightlifting competitions are multistage tournaments with the unique characteristic that the athletes must announce in...

This paper models the relationship between countries' distance from global economic activity, endogenous investments in education and economic development. Firms in remote locations pay greater trade costs on both exports and intermediate imports, reducing the amount of value added left to...