The last decade has seen a growing interest among economists on the effect of diversity on the provision of social goods and the stock of social capital. Indeed, in the workplace, cooperation, trust, and other social goods may be important elements of the smooth functioning of an office, but...

This paper aims to understand how corruption responds to an income loss. We exploit an unexpected 25% wage cut incurred in 2010 by all Romanian public sector employees, including the public education staff. We investigate a corruptible high-stake exam taking place shortly after the wage...

What do applicants care about when choosing a school in Turkey? Are their preferences vertical or horizontal? Which school attributes seem to matter? Do selective schools con-tribute to their students' ; success, or is their performance attributable to the higher ability of the students they...

This paper investigates strategic interaction among airlines in product-quality choices. Using an instrumental variables approach, the paper estimates flight-frequency reaction functions, which relate an airline's frequency on a route to its own characteristics and to the frequencies of...

Applying the theory of yardstick competition to the schooling system, we show that it is optimal to have central tests of student achievement and to engage in benchmarking because it raises the quality of teaching. This is true even if teachers' pay (defined in monetary terms) is not performance...

This paper views teacher quality through the human capital perspective. Teacher quality exhibits substantial growth over teachers’ careers, but why it improves is not well understood. I use a human capital production function nesting On-the-Job-Training (OJT) and Learning-by-Doing (LBD) and...

A recent critique of using teachers' test score value-added (TVA) is that teacher quality is multifaceted; some teachers are effective in raising test scores, others are effective in improving long-term outcomes This paper exploits an institutional setting where high school teachers are randomly...

Building on a theoretical model we test the hypothesis that effort choices and preferences for redistribution are simultaneously determined. Using cross-country panel data from the World Value Survey, we find that it is important to model preferences for redistribution and effort choices...