Single-sex classes within coeducational environments are likely to modify students' risk-taking attitudes in economically important ways. To test this, we designed a controlled experiment using first year college students who made choices over real-stakes lotteries at two distinct dates....

I consider how the availability of a personal computer at home changed employment for married women. I develop a theoretical model that motivates the empirical specifications. Using data from the U.S. CPS from 1984 to 2003, I find that employment is 1.5 to 7 percentage points higher for women in...

Ever since the seminal work of Stigler (1962), economists have recognized that information in markets is costly to acquire and can lead to “search frictionsâ€. The remarkable growth in online search has substantially lowered the cost of information acquisition. Despite this, there is...

It is well documented that graduates enter different occupations in recessions than in booms. In this article, we examine the impact of this reallocation for long-term productivity and output across sectors. We develop a model in which talent flows to stable sectors in recessions and to cyclical...

This paper considers how asymmetric tax treatment, where labour market earnings are taxed but household production is untaxed, aspects educational choice and labour supply. We show that taxes on labour market earnings can generate a large (non-marginal) switch to home production and the ensuing...

We propose a simple investment model which shows that, in the presence of fluctuations in and uncertainty about the opportunity cost of time, marginal individuals may choose to delay their education if the opportunity cost of time is temporarily high. Importantly, it is when the completion of...

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) has been a heavily utilized research tool in medicine for over 60 years. Since the early 2000's, large-scale RCTs have been used in increasingly large numbers in the social sciences to evaluate questions of both policy and theory. The early economics...

We demonstrate how the standard usage of the random incentive system in ambiguity experiments is not incentive compatible if the decision maker is ambiguity averse. We propose a slight modification of the procedure in which the randomization takes place before decisions are made and the state is...

In almost all European Union countries, the gender wage gap is increasing across the wages distribution. In this lecture I briefly survey some recent studies aiming to explain why apparently identical women and men receive such different returns and focus especially on those incorporating...

Women and men may differ in their propensity to choose a risky outcome because of innate preferences or because their innate preferences are modified by pressure to conform to gender-stereotypes. Single-sex environments are likely to modify students’ risk-taking preferences in economically...