This paper studies how different demographic groups respond to incentives by comparing performance in the GRE examination in high and low stakes situations. The high stakes situation is the real GRE examination and the low stakes situation is a voluntary experimental section of the GRE that...

We investigate the impact of a change in the gender composition of the pool of candidates on the academic performance of women in an entrance exam. We use data from a natural experiment that altered the gender composition of the candidates for a nation-wide admission exam to a coding educational...

Even in OECD countries, where an increasing proportion of the workforce has a university degree, the value of basic skills in literacy and numeracy remains high. Indeed, in some countries the return for such skills, in the form of higher wages, is sufficiently large to suggest that they are in...

A commonly held perception is that an elite graduate degree can “scrub” a less prestigious but less costly undergraduate degree. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates from 2003 through 2017, this paper examines the relationship between the status of undergraduate degrees...

This paper studies the impact of exam luck on individuals’ education and labor market success. We leverage unique features of the Norwegian education system that produce random variation in the content of the exams taken by students at the end of high school. Lucky students take exams in...

This paper estimates the effect of exposure to teacher pay-for-performance programs on adult outcomes. We construct a comprehensive data set of schools which have implemented teacher performance pay programs across the United States since 1986, and use our data to calculate the fraction of...

This paper examines the influence of educational mismatch on wages according to workers' region of birth, taking advantage of our access to rich matched employer-employee data for the Belgian private sector for the period 1999-2010. Using a fine-grained approach to measuring educational mismatch...