I study the origin of people's beliefs about their own abilities, emphasizing the feedback loop between beliefs, effort, and outcomes. Consistent with the modern understanding of depression, I show that agents who are either more pessimistic about their own talent or less sure of their own...

In this study, we explore the relation between job characteristics and employees' self-evaluations of performance in comparison to their colleagues' performance. Making use of unique individual panel data of ten large firms in Germany's chemical industry, we focus on monetary rewards (bonus...