We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner has both a direct and an indirect negative effect on the performance of monitored classes in standardized educational tests. The direct effect is the difference in the test performance between classes of the same...

We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner has both a direct and an indirect negative effect on the performance of monitored classes in standardised educational tests. The direct effect is the difference in the test performance between classes of the same...

The "Retired Husband Syndrome", that affects the mental health of wives of retired men around the world, has been anecdotally documented but never formally investigated. We use Japanese micro data and the exogenous variation generated by the 2006 revision of the Japanese Elderly Employment...

We use data on international chess tournaments to study the relationship between age and mental productivity in a brain-intensive profession. We show that less talented players tend to leave the game in the earliest phases of their career. When the effects of age on productivity vary with...

We use data on professional chess tournaments to study how endogenous selection affects the relationship between age and mental productivity in a brain-intensive profession. We show that less talented players are more likely to drop out, and that the age-productivity gradient is heterogeneous by...

We leverage the timing of pandemic-induced school closures to learn about the emergence of ordinal rank effects in education. Using administrative data from Italian middle schools for four cohorts of students, our study reveals that disrupting peer interactions during the first year of middle...