This paper studies gender-related performance differences in competitive environments using a novel setting: high school debate tournaments. I first document large gender gaps in percentage of debates won across all debate formats and find that differences in age and prior tournament experience...

The enrollment criterion adopted by high school athletic associations in the United States for the designation of competitive classifications provides a plausibly exogenous setting for estimating peer effects. The juxtaposition of swimmers participating for schools reassigned to different...

The provision of new schools in established urban areas poses specific design challenges that are not common to schools on green field sites: Proposals to build a new secondary school close to the busy commercial centre of the city of Geneva posed just such a challenge and to meet it the...