This paper provides some evidence that repeat taking of competitive examsmay reduce the impact of background disadvantages on educational outcomes. Using administrative data on the university entrance exam in Turkey, the paper estimates cumulative learning between the first and the nth attempt...

Using data from the Turkish University Entrance Exam, we investigate the extent of the gender gap in college placement, its underlying causes, and potential policy interventions. We estimate preferences using a novel approach which improves our ability to capture substitution patterns and find...

We provide conditions that simplify applying Reny's (1999) better-reply security to Bayesian games, and use these conditions to prove the existence of equilibria for classes of games in which payoff discontinuities arise only at "ties." These games include a general version of all-pay contests,...

Many sales, sports, and research contests are put in place to maximize contestants' performance. We investigate and provide a complete characterization of the prize structures that achieve this objective in settings with many contestants. The contestants may be ex-ante asymmetric in their...

We use a proprietary data set on the floor-level operations at the Bhilai Rail and Structural Mill (RSM) in India to understand how output rose sharply in response to competitive pressures. Output increases came predominantly from reductions in production delays of various kinds. We model...

This paper identifies a new reason for giving preferences to the disadvantaged using a model of contests. There are two forces at work: the effort effect working against giving preferences and the selection effect working for them. When education is costly and easy to obtain (as in the U.S.),...

This paper asks whether the results obtained from using the standard approach to testing the influential Grossman and Helpman "protection for sale" (PFS) model of political economy might arise from a simpler setting. A model of imports and quotas with protection occuring in response to import...

This paper proposes a new test of the Protection for Sale (PFS) model by Grossman and Helpman (1994). Unlike existing methods in the literature, our approach does not require any data on political organizations. We formally show that the PFS model provides the following prediction: In the...

This paper critically and selectively surveys the literature on protection for sale and discusses directions for future research in this area. It suggests that the standard approach needs to be augmented to provide more compelling tests of this model.

There is little work on the inner workings of journals. What factors seem to affect the ability to publish in a journal? Could simple rules (which are already used by some journals) like the immediate rejection of a significant minority of papers, help to streamline the process? At what cost?...