This paper estimates peer effects in a university context where students are randomly assigned to sections. While students benefit from better peers on average, low-achieving students are harmed by high-achieving peers. Analyzing students' course evaluations suggests that peer effects are driven...

A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions - small group instruction given parallel to lectures. In this paper, we study whether instructors with a higher academic rank teach tutorials more effectively in a setting where students are randomly assigned to tutorial...

Business degrees are popular and lead to high earnings. Female business graduates, however, earn less than their male counterparts. These gender differences can be traced back to university, where women shy away from majors like finance that lead to high earnings. In this paper, we investigate...

In a previous paper, we have shown that academic rank is largely unrelated to tutorial teaching effectiveness. In this paper, we further explore the effectiveness of the lowest-ranked instructors: students. We confirm that students are almost as effective as senior instructors, and we produce...

The immense literature on discrimination treats outcomes as relative: One group suffers compared to another. But does a difference arise because agents discriminate against others - are exophobic - or because they favor their own kind - are endophilic? This difference matters, as the relative...

The Dunning-Kruger effect states that low performers vastly overestimate their performance while high performers more accurately assess their performance. Researchers usually interpret this empirical pattern as evidence that the low skilled are vastly overconfident while the high skilled are...

We extend Becker's model of discrimination by allowing firms to have discriminatory and favoring preferences simultaneously. We draw the two-preference parallel for the marginal firm, illustrate the implications for wage differentials, and consider the implied long-run equilibrium. In the...

Teachers often deliver the same lesson multiple times in one day. In contrast to year-to-year teaching experience, it is unclear how this teaching repetition affects student outcomes. We examine the effects of teaching repetition in a setting where students are randomly assigned to a university...

Does growing up with a sister rather than a brother affect personality? In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the effects of siblings' gender on adults' personality, using data from 85,887 people from 12 large representative surveys covering 9 countries (the United States, the...

For papers to have scientific impact, they need to impress our peers in their role as referees, journal editors, and members of conference committees. Does better writing help our papers make it past these gatekeepers? In this study, we estimate the effect of writing quality by comparing how 30...