Behavioral economics attempts to integrate insights from psychology, neuroscience, and sociology in order to better predict individual outcomes and develop more effective policy. While the field has been successfully applied to many areas, education has, so far, received less attention - a...

Training by firms is a central means by which workers accumulate human capital, yet firms may be reluctant to provide general training if workers can quit and use their gained skills elsewhere. “Training contracts” that impose a penalty for premature quitting can help alleviate this...

Behavioral economics attempts to integrate insights from psychology, neuroscience, and sociology in order to better predict individual outcomes and develop more effective policy. While the field has been successfully applied to many areas, education has, so far, received less attention – a...

Using survey data from a field experiment in the U.S., we test whether and how financial incentives change student behavior. We find that providing post-secondary scholarships with incentives to meet performance, enrollment, and/or attendance benchmarks induced students to devote more time to...

In this paper, we examine the role of impatience in the formation of human capital - arguably the most important investment decision individuals make during their lifetimes. We pay particular attention to a set of investment behaviors that cannot be explained solely by variation in exponential...