Culture, Feedback, and Gender in Education

This dissertation consists of four distinct empirical essays that address various aspects of the economics of education. Chapters 2 and 3 show that patience and risk-taking as intertemporal preferences are closely related to differences in student achievement across and within countries. Chapter 3 hereby employs novel machine-learning methods to derive intertemporal preference measures from Facebook data. Using a field experiment among university students, chapter 4 shows that the ordering in which positive and negative performance feedback is provided, matters for study motivation and to some extent also exam performance. Finally, chapter 5 presents new insights to gender gaps in adult cognitive skills, showing that they are highly related to wages, especially at the top of the wage distribution.