Marcello Sartarelli

• PhD Economics
• Professor (Tenured) at Complutense University of Madrid

This paper tests whether barely obtaining a pass score in at least one of two midterm tests has an effect on subsequent achievement in a Math course. To estimate the effect, we created a novel dataset by linking administrative and survey data on students at a medium size Spanish university and used a regression discontinuity design in which the cut...

Bidding in different (single object) auctions, or cross-bidding, and bidding incrementally within one auction, or nibbling, are two phenomena observed in platforms like eBay. This paper tests with numerical methods the validity of a theoretical setting that rationalizes such behavior, while bidders are assumed to observe privately and without error...

In this paper we study whether substituting family inputs with school resources in an academically oriented environment has an impact on achievement in high-stakes national examinations. We use administrative data for England to estimate the effect of attending a selective boarding school that admits an unusually high share of pupils with low socio...

We study how the ratio between the length of the second and fourth digit (2D:4D) correlates with choices in social and risk preferences elicitation tasks by building a large dataset from five experimental projects with more than 800 subjects. Our results confirm the recent literature that downplays the link between 2D:4D and many domains of economi...

RESUMEN Este trabajo analiza un problema (u oportunidad) creciente en las últimas décadas a nivel universitario como es la internacionalización de los estudios debido, principalmente, a la globalización en la Edu-cación Superior. En este nuevo contexto, instituciones como la UA se han visto obligadas a incorporar el inglés como medio de instrucción...

Evidence showing that on average left-handed (L), who are 10% in a population, tend to earn less than others is solely based on survey data. This paper is the first to test the relationship between handedness and earnings experimentally and also to assess whether the mechanism underlying it is predominantly cognitive or psychological. Data on 432 u...

We study how cognitive abilities correlate with behavioral choices by collecting evidence from almost 1200 subjects across eight experimental projects concerning a wide variety of tasks, including some classic risk and social preference elicitation protocols. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been administered to all our experimental subjects...

Performance targets are ubiquitous in all areas of an individual's life such as education, jobs, sport competitions and charity donations. In this paper I assess whether meeting performance targets in tests at school has an effect on students' subsequent behaviour. This is helpful to test whether motivation and effort by students, parents and schoo...

The paper examines whether meeting performance targets in tests at school has an effect on students' subsequent achievement in education and the take-up by schools of financial support from the government for students. We build a theoretical model to describe the channels through which students' belief of their ability, as proxied by previous perfo...