Collegiate social Greek letter organizations, known as fraternities and sororities, are longstanding and prevalent fixtures on college and university campuses in the United States. Prior research has shown that membership alters academic performance, health-related behaviors, and social...

Slightly missing a school starting age cutoff date, and more generally a student's relative age in their cohort, has been shown in recent research to have important effects. A student's relative age appears to influence their academic success in elementary and middle school, and there is mixed...

The advent of smartphones has caused a dramatic change in consumers' access to information and media. Using data on consumer telephone service choices, along with geographic data on cellular network infrastructure and software applications, we estimate the demand for telephone services. We allow...

I estimate the effect of military service during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars on civilian labor and educational outcomes using several empirical methodologies including sibling fixed effects and propensity score matching. Since military occupations and training have changed significantly in the...

This paper analyzes 12,596 wagering decisions of 6,064 contestants in the US game show Jeopardy!, focusing on the anchoring phenomenon in financial decision-making. We find that contestants anchor heavily on the initial dollar value of a clue in their wagering decision, even though there exists...

Can media coverage of shooters encourage future mass shootings? We explore the link between the day-to-day prime time television news coverage of shootings on ABC World News Tonight and subsequent mass shootings in the US from January 1, 2013 to June 23, 2016. To circumvent latent endogeneity...

Using 4,279 episodes of the popular US game show Jeopardy!, we analyze whether the opponents' gender is able to explain the gender gap in competitive behavior. Our findings indicate that gender differences disappear when women compete against men. This result is surprising, but emerges with...

This paper identifies matches on the male and female professional tennis tours in which one player faces a high payoff from being "on the bubble" of direct entry into one of the lucrative Grand Slam tournaments, while their opposition does not. Analyzing over 378,000 matches provides strong...

This paper analyzes potential gender differences in competitive environments using a sample of over 100,000 professional tennis matches. We focus on two phenomena of the labor and sports economics literature: the hot-hand and clutch-player effects. First, we find strong evidence for the hot-hand...

Studying competitiveness and risk-taking among Jeopardy! contestants in the US, this paper analyzes whether and how gender differences emerge with age and by gender of opponent. Our samples contain 186 children (aged 10–12), 310 teenagers (aged 13–17), and 299 undergraduate college students....