Performance targets are ubiquitous in all areas of an individual’s life, such as education, jobs, sport competitions and charity donations. In this paper I study the effect of meeting performance targets in school tests on the probability that students subsequently engage in risky behaviour. This is helpful to assess whether behavioural channels such as motivation and effort by students, parent...

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Subjects’ incentives are drastically affected, as more individuals manipulate their preferentes. Including a safety school in the constrained li...

The literature has not sufficiently engaged the emergence and expansion of the phenomenon of Slave export. This article contributes to the existing stream by examining the role of human capital or intelligence on slave exports. We postulate and justify a reasonable hypothesis that countries which were endowed with higher human capital levels were more likely to experience lower levels of slave ...

This paper uses the pupil census in England to explore how family house moves contribute to school and residential segregation. We track the moves of a single cohort as it approaches the secondary school admission age. We also combine a number of cohorts and estimate a dynamic nonlinear model for house moving with unobserved effects. These approaches yield the same result: moving is significant...

Relying on private tutoring expenditures in South Korea, this paper examines whether large family size has a strong negative impact on educational investments in children. In the face of difficulties in finding an exogenous IV for family size, the paper employs a nonparametric bounding method. Our primary finding is that quantity-quality trade-offs in educational investments function in a way t...

This paper documents the patterns and examines the factors contributing to a gender gap in educational achievements in early seventh grade of schooling using a recent and nationally representative panel of Australian children. Regression results indicate that females excel at non-numeracy subjects at later grades whereas males outperform females in numeracy in all grades, whether at the mean or...

Previous studies of intergenerational income mobility have typically focused at on estimating persistence across generations at the mean of the distribution of sons’ earnings. Here, we use the relatively new unconditional quantile regression (UQR) technique to consider how the association between parental income in childhood and sons’ adult earnings vary across the distribution of sons’ earning...

The literature on school choice assumes that families can submit a preference list over all the schools they want to be assigned to. However, in many real-life instances families are only allowed to submit a list containing a limited number of schools. Subjects’ incentives are drastically affected, as more individuals manipulate their preferentes. Including a safety school in the constrained li...

This paper focuses on one potentially important contributor to the achievement gap between black and white students, differences in their exposure to novice teachers. We present a model that explores the pressures that may lead school administrators to distribute novice teachers unequally across or within schools. Using a rich micro-level data set provided by the North Carolina Department of Pu...

Interactions between Local and Migrant Workers at the Workplace In this paper we consider the interaction between local workers and migrants in the production process of a firm. Both local workers and migrants can invest effort in assimilation activities in order to increase the assimilation of the migrants into the firm and thereby increase their interaction and production activities. We consi...