We investigate a novel determinant of household financial delinquency, namely, people's subjective expectations regarding the cost-benefit trade-off in default decisions. These expectations are determined by individuals' self-efficacy, which is a non-cognitive ability that measures how strongly...

This paper investigates employee performance appraisals using data from a single US firm between 2001 and 2007. We find that performance appraisals are both informative and drive important components of the employment contract. We find that employee appraisal scores vary considerably both...

We use information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and supplementary data sources to examine how cognitive performance, measured at approximately the end of secondary schooling, is related to the labor market outcomes of 20 through 50 year olds. Our estimates control...

A large economics literature has shown long term impacts of birth weight on adult outcomes, including IQ and earnings that are often robust to sibling or twin fixed effects. We examine potential mechanisms underlying these effects by incorporating findings from the genetics and neuroscience...

Cognitive performance during high-stakes exams can be affected by random disturbances that, even if transitory, may have permanent consequences for long-term schooling attainment and labor market outcomes. We evaluate this hypothesis among Israeli high school students who took a series of high...

We use nine waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to investigate the large labor market height premium observed in the BHPS, where each inch of height is associated with a 1.5 percent increase in wages, for both men and women. We find that half of the premium can be explained by the...

Qualitative self-assessments of economic preferences have recently gained popularity, often supported by experimental validation, a method that links them to choices in incentivized elicitations. We illustrate theoretically that experimental validation may fail to produce reliable new measures....

A rich literature explores gender differences between men and women, but an increasing share of the population identifies their gender in some other way. Analyzing data on roughly 10,000 students and 1,500 adults, we find that such gender minorities are less confident and provide less favorable...