In a recent paper, Fack et al. (2019, American Economic Review) convincingly argue and theoretically demonstrate that there may be strong incentives for students to play non-truth-telling strategies when reporting preferences over schools, even when the celebrated deferred acceptance algorithm is employed. Their statistical test also rejects the (weak) truth-telling assumption in favour of another assumption, called stability, using a single data set on school choice in Paris. This paper uses Swedish school choice data and replicates their empirical finding in 45 of the 57 investigated data sets (p value threshold 0.05).

As a recent literature has demonstrated, men and women differ in their willingness to sort into competitive environments. In particular, men are more willing than women to compete. We investigate whether it is possible to reduce the gender gap in willingness to compete through an information intervention that informs participants of the gap and advises them about the potential earnings implications. We find that this simple information intervention reduced the gender gap, both in a laboratory study at a German university and in a field study with Swedish high school students. Whereas some participants (primarily high-performing women) benefited from the intervention, others lost out. We discuss the implications for efficiency and policy.

Recently, policy makers worldwide have suggested and passed legislation to ban mobile phone use in schools. The influential (and only quantitative) evaluation by Beland and Murphy (2016), suggests that this is a very low-cost but effective policy to improve student performance. In particular, it suggests that the lowest-achieving students have the most to gain. Using a similar empirical setup but with data from Sweden, we partly replicate their study and thereby add external validity to this policy question. Furthermore, we increase the survey response rate of schools to approximately 75 %, although at the expense of the amount of information collected in the survey. In Sweden, we find no impact of mobile phone bans on student performance and can reject even small-sized gains.