This Paper studies a model where Information Technology, while typically increasing overall inequality, is likely to harm some people at intermediate and high levels of the distribution of income but to benefit people at the bottom; where within a given occupation it may harm some workers while...

This paper combines a randomized experiment and a structural model to test whether monitoring and financial incentives can reduce teacher absence and increase learning. In 57 schools in India, randomly chosen out of 113, a teacher’s daily attendance was verified through photographs with time...

It is clear that education has an important effect on wages paid in the labour market. It is not clear, however, whether this is due to the role that education plays in raising the productivity of workers (the human capital explanation) or whether education simply reflects the ability of the...

In the rural areas of developing countries, teacher absence is a widespread problem. This paper tests whether a simple incentive program based on teacher presence can reduce teacher absence, and whether it has the potential to lead to more teaching activities and better learning. In 60 informal...

We study the determinants of individual attitudes towards risk and, in particular, why some individuals exhibit extremely high risk aversion. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics we find that a policy induced increase in high school graduation rates leads to significantly fewer...

In this paper we consider the effects of minimum wage legislation in an overlapping generations model. In our model there is an intergenerational externality in the accumulation of human capital since the production of human capital of every new generation depends positively on the average human...

Using data from a natural experiment with high payoffs in education, we examine whether the competitive nature of tournament structure explains the performance gender-gap. We find that performance is statistically lower for women, the variance of performance is higher for men, and the tails of...

This paper analyses the determinants of academic performance of first-year undergraduate students in Economics at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, over the period 2001-2005. We focus on a few core subjects which differ in their degree of mathematical complexity. Type of school, specialization...

Do women perform worse than equally able men in stressful competitive settings? We ask this question for competitions with a high payoff---admissions to tuition-free selective universities. With data on an entire cohort of Czech students graduating from secondary schools and applying to...

Two literatures exist concerning cross-border merger activity’s impact on domestic wages: one focusing on spillover-effects; the other focusing on bargaining-effects. Motivated by scarce theoretical scholarship spanning these literatures, we nest both mechanisms in a single conceptual...