We propose a computational model to study (the evolution of) post-secondary education. “Consumers” who differ in quality shop around for desirable colleges or universities. “Firms” that differ in quality signal the availability of their services to desirable students. As long as they...

If school admission committees use alphabetically sorted lists of applicants in their evaluations, one's position in the alphabet according to last name initial may be important in determining access to selective schools. In Jurajda and Münich (2010) we provided evidence consistent with this...

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...

This paper describes a classroom experiment demnstrating the price mechanism and the clearing of the markets in an endowment economy. Participants receive random endowments of two goods they may trade in order to maximize a given utility function. A market-clearing price is reached when no...

This paper is on measuring the gap in returns to education between foreign-born and native workers in France, Germany, and Austria and investigates the extent to which this gap can be explained by a mis-match between the actual and the years of schooling typical for a given occupation. The...

High-stakes admission exams to selective schools create incentives for more intensive study effort possibly increasing study achievements of students. Exploiting the exogenous change of a schooling system and using two waves of TIMSS survey data we find that high-stakes exams increase math test...

The Czech Republic exhibits high geographical variation of both human capital and universities. We examine a potential source of human capital spatial disparities: the unequal access to tertiary education caused by the absence/presence of a local university. We model both a secondary school...

One’s position in an alphabetically sorted list may be important in determining access to rationed goods or oversubscribed public services. Motivated by anecdotal evidence, we investigate the importance of the position in the alphabet of the last name initial of Czech students for their...

The admission process into secondary schools in the Czech Republic involves high risk of ending up at an undesired school if failing to be admitted to one’s preferred school. Hence, the application decision is an important element of the process since individuals have to assess their chances...

Economic theory presumes that individuals respond to true marginal prices when de- ciding on the amount of goods and services they buy and many other economic decisions. However, learning about these marginal prices is often costly in terms of search time, cog- nitive effort or monetary outlays....