The paper enriches a standard signaling model of education with issues of social distance defined over educational achievements. More specifically it considers the effects that the presence of conformist and status seeking individuals has on educational dynamics. Under very reasonable...

We analyze an economy populated by a sequence of generations who decide over their consumption and investment in human capital of their immediate descendants. The objective of the paper is twofold: firstly, to identify the impact of strategic interactions between consecutive generations on the...

We introduce grading into games of status. Each player chooses effort, pro­ducing a stochastic output or score. Utilities depend on the ranking of all the scores. By clustering scores into grades, the ranking is coarsened, and the incen­tives to work are changed.We apply games of status to...

Letter grades are noisy and coarse measures of academic achievement. However, these grades serve as important signals to both employers and to the student on his or her ability. I study the consequences of these noisy measures using administrative data from the National University of Singapore...

We introduce grading into games of status. Each player chooses effort, producing a stochastic output or score. Utilities depend on the ranking of all the scores. By clustering scores into grades, the ranking is coarsened, and the incentives to work are changed. We first apply games of status to...

This paper studies a model where student effort and talent interact with parental and teachers' investments, as well as with school system resources. The model is rich, yet sufficiently stylized to provide novel implications. It can show, for example, that an improvement in parental outside...

We propose a solution to the trade-off between Pareto efficiency and stability in matching markets. We define a matching to be essentially stable if any claim initiates a chain of reassignments that ultimately results in the initial claimant losing the object she claimed to a third agent. Our...

In a heterogeneous population divided into two cultural groups, we investigate the intergenerational dynamics of norms, modeled as preferences over actions, as depending on strategic environments. We find that environments with strategic complementarity or substitutability lead to different...

Scholars have long recognized the difficulties of communicating risk to the public. The rise of mobile gaming presents unprecedented opportunities for risk communicators to reach millions of potential users in engaging and potentially effective ways. Gamifying risk communication may help users...

This paper studies two-sided many-to-one matching in which student preferences can depend on the assignment of other students, allowing for peer effects and externalities. We show that stable matchings are tractably described by cutoffs and matching statistics that satisfy a market clearing and...