Many economic, political and social environments can be described as contests in which
agents exert costly effort while competing over the distribution of a scarce resource. These …

This chapter surveys the contributions of laboratory experiments to labor economics. We
begin with a discussion of methodological issues: when (and why) is a lab experiment the …

We show that grit, a skill that has been shown to be highly predictive of achievement, is
malleable in childhood and can be fostered in the classroom environment. We evaluate a …

Unethical behavior within organizations is not rare. We investigate experimentally the role of
status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one's …

Research by psychologists and economists demonstrates that many non-cognitive skills are
malleable in both children and adolescents, but we have limited knowledge on what schools …

We develop a novel computerized real effort task, based on moving sliders across a screen,
to test experimentally whether agents are disappointment averse when they compete in a …

This article establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank
during primary school has lasting impacts on secondary school achievement that are …

We study the effect of providing relative performance feedback information on performance,
when individuals are rewarded according to their absolute performance. A natural …

Rank-order relative-performance evaluation, in which pay, promotion, symbolic awards, and
educational achievement depend on the rank of individuals in the distribution of …

We examine whether private feedback about relative performance can mitigate moral
hazard in competitive environments by modifying the agents' self-esteem. In our …