A number of recent studies show that males may increase their performance by more than females in response to competitive incentives. The literature suggests that such a male competitive advantage may contribute to observed gender gaps in labor force pay and achievement. Understanding which...

We develop a model in which many heterogeneous agents invest in human capital as they compete for better college admission slots or employment opportunities. The model provides theoretical predictions about how affirmative action or preferential treatment policies change the distribution of...

We leverage a field experiment across three distinct school districts to identify key pieces of a structural model of adolescent human capital production. Our focus is inspired by the contemporary psychology of education literature, which expresses learning as a function of the ratio of the time...

Experiments involving multiple public goods with contribution thresholds capture many features of charitable giving environments in which donors try to coordinate their contributions across various potential recipients. We present results from a laboratory experiment that introduces endowment...

We evaluate the impact of deliberative dialogues about girls' education with groups of parents, teachers, and girls on the education outcomes of girls in rural Zimbabwe. Dialog-based engagement campaigns increased mathematics performance and school enrolment. In later periods, the program was...

This article provides an overview of Canada's primary and secondary school disruptions during COVID-19, then summarizes recent data and research showing the detrimental impacts of these disruptions on students. Novel aspects of our analysis include an assessment of the strictness of lockdown...

We challenge the prevailing view that pure informational lobbying (in the absence of political contributions and evidence distortion or withholding) leads to better informed policymaking. In the absence of lobbying, the policymaker may prioritize the more-important or ex ante morepromising...

An organization must decide which proposals to fund. In evaluating the proposals, the organization may rely on those applying for funding to produce evidence about the merits of their own proposals. We consider the role of a capacity constraint preventing the organization from funding all...

We develop a model of policymaking in which a politician decides how much expertise to acquire or how informed to become about issues before interest groups engage in monetary lobbying. For a range of issues, the policymaker prefers to remain clueless about the merits of reform, even when...

We develop a model of lobbying in which a time and resource constrained policymaker first chooses which policy proposals to learn about, before choosing which to implement. The policymaker reviews the proposals of the interest groups who provide the highest contributions. We study how policy...