We show that, when school quality is measured by the educational standard and attaining the standard requires costly effort, secondary education needs not be a hierarchy with private schools offering better quality than public schools, as in Epple and Romano, 1998. An alternative configuration,...

We model individual careers in sports and games from initial entry to eventual exit or success as a discrete - choice, finite - horizon optimization problem. We apply this model to the international game of chess and study cross - country differences in the relative success of players. While we...