Do the contests with the largest prizes attract the most able contestants? Do contestants avoid competition? In this paper we show that the distribution of abilities plays a crucial role in determining contest choice. Positive sorting exist only when the proportion of high ability contestants is...

This paper studies the determinants of school choice, focusing on the role of information. We consider how parents’ search efforts and their capacity to process information (i.e., to correctly assess schools) affect the quality of the schools they choose for their children. Using a novel...

This paper studies the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on individual performance and on individual affective response, when agents are rewarded according to their absolute performance. In a laboratory set-up, agents perform a real effort task and when receiving...

We investigate whether the gender composition of teams affect their economic performance. We study a large business game, played in groups of three, where each group takes the role of a general manager. There are two parallel competitions, one involving undergraduates and the other involving...

There is an enormous literature on gender gaps in pay and labour market participation but virtually no literature on gender gaps in unemployment rates. Although there are some countries in which there is essentially no gender gap in unemployment, there are others in which the female unemployment...

We study the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on performance, when individuals are rewarded according to their absolute performance. A natural experiment that took place in a high school offers an unusual opportunity to test this effect in a real-effort setting. For...

This paper documents and studies the gender gap in performance among associate lawyers in the United States. Unlike other high-skilled professions, the legal profession measures and rewards productivity with objective methods that are widely used and comparable across firms: the number of hours...

This paper tests whether aggregate matching is consistent with random matching or stock-flow matching. Using U.K. matching data and correcting for temporal aggregation bias, estimates of the random matching function are consistent with previous work in this field. The data however support the...

In the mid-1980s,most accessions to permanent employment in several European countries have been through fixed-term contracts. This paper studies the duration pattern of fixed-term contracts and the determinants of their conversion into permanent ones in Spain, where the share of fixed-term...