Analia Schlosser
Do different demographic groups respond differently to incentives and cope differently with competitive pressure? Interest in the effects of incentives and competitive pressure on performance is motivated by the increased use of aptitude tests for college admissions and job screening and the growing use of standardized tests for the measurement of school advancement and the assessment of student’s learning. While it is clear that students’ motivation affects performance, less attention has been given to differences in test-taking motivation across demographic groups or group differences in response to performance based incentives or what is at stake in a given test. While at CESifo, from 20 to 30 August, Analia Schlosser will examine how different demographic groups respond to incentives by comparing their performance in “high” and “low” stakes situations.
Ms Schlosser’s research focuses on the economics of education, labour economics and family economics. In a recent paper co-authored with Rafael Lalive, Andreas Steinhauer and Josef Zweimuller (forthcoming at the Review of Economics Studies), she studies how parental leave regulations affect mothers’ careers by examining how mothers’ return to work behaviour and labour market outcomes are affected by alternative mixes of job protection and cash benefits. Exploiting a series of major parental leave policy changes in Austria, they find that longer cash benefits lead to a significant delay in return to work and that the magnitude of this effect depends on the relative length of job protection and cash benefits. However, despite their impact on time on leave, they do not find a significant effect on mothers’ labour market outcomes in the medium run, neither of benefit duration nor of job-protection duration.
Analia Schlosser is a senior lecturer (tenured) at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University. After receiving her PhD in economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2002, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University.