With SACMEQ and PASEC there are now two large data bases available on student achievement, socio-economic background and school and teacher characteristics in both anglophone and francophone Sub-Saharan Africa. A joint analysis of PASEC and SACMEQ in a common education production function...

We examine the incentives to self-select into politics and how they depend on the transparency of the entry process. To this end, we set up a two-stage political competition model and test its key mechanisms in the lab. At the entry stage, potential candidates compete in a contest to become...

Many decisions taken in legislatures or committees are subject to lobbying efforts. A seminal contribution to the literature on vote-buying is the legislative lobbying model pioneered by Groseclose and Snyder (1996), which predicts that lobbies will optimally form supermajorities in many cases....

Case studies of cartels and recent theory suggest that repeated communication is key for stable cooperation in environments where signals about others' actions are noisy. However, empirically the exact role of communication is not well understood. We study cooperation under different monitoring...

The strive for social esteem is an important motive for pro-social behavior. Many people want to be seen as nice. Recent theories have suggested that the valuation of such esteem depends on the audience. In this study we look at trust and trustworthiness towards people who do or do not identify...

Being perceived as trustworthy comes with substantial economic benefits in many situations. Making other people think you are a trustworthy person may, therefore, be an important motive for charity and other forms of prosocial behavior, provided these activities work as signals of...

Leaks are pervasive in politics. Hence, many committees that nominally operate under secrecy de facto operate under the threat that information might be passed on to outsiders. We study theoretically and experimentally how this possibility affects the behavior of committee members and the...

Algorithm-based decision support systems play an increasingly important role in decisions involving exploration tasks, such as product searches, portfolio choices, and human resource procurement. These tasks often involve a trade-off between exploration and exploitation, which can be highly...

About 50% of Bangladesh's female youth working-age population is not in employment, education, or training (NEET). Reducing this number is an important policy goal. However, there is a broad consensus that pervasive gender norms hamper this goal in Bangladesh and other countries from the Global...