We estimate the causal impact of school and classroom gender composition on achievement. We take advantage of the random assignment of Korean middle school students to single-sex schools, co-educational (coed) schools with single-sex classes, and coed schools with mixed-gender classes. Male...

This paper examines non-price competition among colleges to attract highly qualified students, exploiting the South Korean setting where the national government sets rules governing applications. We identify some basic facts about the behavior of colleges before and after a 1994 policy change...

This paper examines whether bonus compensation for managers and workers matter for manufacturing plant productivity. We use a model based on a Cobb-Douglas production function where bonus incentives can increase worker effort and attract more skilled workers leading to increases in plant...

more roses get a larger number of dates than their counterparts.

This paper examines the possibility that a child's years of schooling could increase in the number of siblings, instead of being diminished by competition for parents' resources: if unable to finance the education of their younger children, parents may do so through their older children's labor...

We examine the effect of single-sex schooling on students’ competitiveness by studying middle school students in Seoul who were randomly assigned to either single-sex or coeducational schools within their school districts. Contrary to popular belief and existing studies, our results suggest...

Beauty has been shown to be valuable in many markets and supposedly can be improved through plastic surgery. This raises the question of how effective plastic surgery is in improving a person’s beauty and economic outcomes. We find empirical evidence that while people improve their facial...

The large literature on costly signaling and the somewhat scant literature on preference signaling had varying success in showing the effectiveness of signals. We use a field experiment to show that even when everyone can send a signal, signals are free and the only costs are opportunity costs,...

Marital sorting along education, income and other salient dimensions is well-documented for many countries. The degree of marital sorting may influence income inequality, intergenerational mobility, and household labor supply, and other economic outcomes. Marital sorting is thought to arise from...

We explore education's role in improving the allocation of labor between China's agricultural and nonagricultural sectors and measure the portion of China's recent growth attributable to this channel. Using detailed micro-level data and an empirical model that allows for the endogenous selection...