We develop a model in which many heterogeneous agents invest in human capital as they compete for better college admission slots or employment opportunities. The model provides theoretical predictions about how affirmative action or preferential treatment policies change the distribution of...

We leverage a field experiment across three distinct school districts to identify key pieces of a structural model of adolescent human capital production. Our focus is inspired by the contemporary psychology of education literature, which expresses learning as a function of the ratio of the time...

In a model of project design, evaluation, and selection, we explore how the incentives to improve the design of projects depend on the availability of funding and the process of evaluation. We show that project designers (researchers or NGOs) prefer to subject their projects to less-rigorous...

When multiple charities, social programs and community projects simultaneously vie for funding, donors risk miscoordinating their contributions leading to an inefficient distribution of funding across projects. Community chests and other intermediary organizations facilitate coordination among...

In models of dynamic multilateral bargaining, the literature tends to focus on stationary subgame perfect or stationary Markov perfect equilibria, which restrict attention to forward-looking, history-independent strategies. Evidence supporting such refinements come from environments in which...

After introducing a measure for educational polarization (EduPol ), this paper presents a theoretical framework to understand whether and how EduPol may affect the contest for power in society. The model suggests that societies with high degrees of EduPol (i.e., substantial shares with either no...

We examine the impact of a large, randomized Girls' Education Challenge (GEC) project in rural Zimbabwe. The multifaceted project initially provided information about girls' rights and education barriers to girls, parents, teachers, and others. Later, the project introduced a learn-to-read...

We develop a methodology to track and quantify the economic impacts of lock-down and re-opening policies by Canadian provinces in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, using data that is available with a relatively short time-lag. To do so, we adapt, calibrate and implement a dynamic,...

Experiments involving multiple public goods with contribution thresholds capture many features of charitable giving environments in which donors try to coordinate their contributions across various potential recipients. We present results from a laboratory experiment that introduces endowment...