School systems regularly use student assessments for accountability purposes. But, as highlighted by our conceptual model, different configurations of assessment usage generate performance-conducive incentives of different strengths for different stakeholders in different school environments. We...

In this paper, we study the impact of disclosing information about school quality of private schools in Brazil on school choice. Particularly, we investigate whether test score disclosure affected private schools' tuition prices. In 2006, Brazil started to announce the schools' average test...

We study the impact of communication on behavior in a two-stage coordination game with asymmetric payoffs. We test experimentally whether individuals can avoid a head-to-head confrontation by means of coordinated strategies. In particular we analyze whether and how quickly a conflict-avoidance...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts' judgments, sometimes in the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers' choices or, conversely, are they conferred on the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data about the most important...

We study the impact of expert reviews on the demand for HIV treatments. A novel feature of our study is that we observe two reviews for each HIV drug and focus attention on consumer responses when experts disagree. Reviews are provided by both a doctor and an activist in the HIV lifestyle...

Job seekers often face substantial information frictions related to potential job quality. This is especially true in international labor markets, where intermediaries match prospective migrants with employers abroad. We conducted a randomized trial in Indonesia to explore how information about...

Evidence on behavior of experts in credence goods markets raises an important causality issue: Do "fair prices" induce "good behavior", or do "good experts" post "fair prices"? To answer this question we propose and test a model with three seller types: "the good" choose fair prices and behave...

In this paper we study the role of covenants in franchise contracts that restrict the recruitment and hiring of employees from other units within the same franchise chain in suppressing competition for workers. Based on an analysis of 2016 Franchise Disclosure Documents, we find that...

Most workers in the developing world do not receive the benefits they are legally entitled to. Why, then, is there so little public enforcement? This paper argues that this is partly because of a lack of an autonomous and professional bureaucracy. Using a novel dataset with objective measures of...

This paper provides evidence of a consistent gap in the value of cultural goods exported from Italy and the value declared by its trading partners in official trade statistics for the period 1994-2021 and discusses it in the context of the literature on illicit trafficking in cultural property,...