Attending kindergarten (KG) has been shown to have persistent benefits, but the peer effects of KG remain largely unexplored. We fill this gap in the literature by using nationally representative panel data on a cohort of middle-school students (grade 7) in China. We demonstrate that when peers...

The theory of fiscal and regulatory competition between jurisdictions is more advanced than its empirical testing. This is particularly true of labor regulation in general, and minimum wage regulation in particular, and especially so for developing countries. This paper utilizes the spatial lag...

The phenomenon of family governance in Chinese family businesses may not only signal a high second-party agency cost that infringes on the interests of small and medium shareholders, but it may also signal this as a stable governance structure. Based on the theory of signal transmission, this...

In this paper, we analyse the relationship between China's structural transformation and the inclusiveness of its economic growth. China's economy has undergone significant structural changes since it initiated the economic reforms in 1978. Economic activities have shifted from the...

In this note, we present a novel computerized real effort task based on moving sliders across a screen which overcomes many of the drawbacks of existing real effort tasks. The task was first developed and used by us in Gill and Prowse (American Economic Review, forthcoming). We outline the...

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this pressing open question in public finance, we estimate a life-cycle model in which the optimal employment, retirement and consumption decisions of forward-looking...

We use an online real-effort experiment to investigate how bonus-based pay and worker productivity interact with workplace cheating. Firms often use bonus-based compensation plans, such as group bonuses and firm-wide profit sharing, that induce considerable uncertainty in how much workers are...

We explore the influence of cognitive ability and judgment on strategic behavior in the beauty contest game (where the Nash equilibrium action is zero). Using the level-k model of bounded rationality, cognitive ability and judgment both predict higher level strategic thinking. However,...

Will college students who set goals for themselves work harder and perform better? In theory, setting goals can help time-inconsistent students to mitigate their self-control problem. In practice, there is little credible evidence on the causal effects of goal setting for college students. We...

Response times are a simple low-cost indicator of the process of reasoning in strategic games (Rubinstein, 2007; Rubinstein, 2016). We leverage the dynamic nature of response-time data from repeated strategic interactions to measure the strategic complexity of a situation by how long people think on...