This paper examines, both theoretically and empirically, the effect of social networks and belonging to minority groups (or race) on the probability of winning in reality television shows. We develop a theoretical model that studies viewer behavior by presenting a framework of competition...

The paper argues that access to public infrastructure plays a crucial role on the presence of private schools in a community, as it could not only minimise the cost of production, but also ensure a high return to private investment. Results using community, school and child/household-level PROBE...

The payoff to schooling among the foreign born in the US is only around one-half of the payoff for the native born. This paper examines whether this differential is related to the quality of the schooling immigrants acquired abroad. The paper uses the Over-education/ Required...

Among policymakers, educators and economists there remains a strong, sometimes heated, debate on the extent to which good schools matter. This is seen, for instance, in the strong trend towards establishing accountability systems in education in many countries across the world. In this paper, in...

This paper analyzes the response of secondary schools to changes in their quality ratings. The current analysis is the first to address the impact of quality scores that have been published by a newspaper (Trouw), rather than public interventions. Our research design exploits the substantial...

This paper analyzes whether information on high school quality published by a national newspaper affects school choice in the Netherlands. For this purpose, we use both school level and individual student level data. First, we study the causal effect of quality scores on the influx of new high...

This paper adopts the technique of DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) to decompose differences in the distribution of PISA test scores in Canada, and assesses the relative contribution of differences in the distribution of “class size” and time-in-term, other school factors and student...

We examine the influence of guilt and trust on the performance of credence goods markets. An expert can make a promise to a consumer first, whereupon the consumer can express her trust by paying an interaction price before the expert’s provision and charging decisions. We argue that the...

This paper exploits a unique opportunity to evaluate the impact of the quality change in the labor and delivery services on maternal and infant health. Since basic medical care has been universally available in Ukraine, implementation of the Mother and Infant Health Project allows addressing...

We estimate the effect of publicly disseminated information about school-level achievement on students' mobility between elementary schools. We find that students are more likely to leave their school when poor school-level performance is revealed. In general, parents respond to information soon...