Abstract Each year two million secondary-school students across West Africa sit coordinated exams. Pass rates fluctuate enormously, fueling speculation about cheating and short-term policy changes. To investigate these hypotheses, we construct hybrid exams containing items spanning 2011-2019 administer to 4,380 students. Exam difficulty alone explains 80 percent of pass rate fluctuatio...

Abstract Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, evidence the effect large incentives cognitive biases is scant. We test four widely documented biases: base-rate neglect, anchoring, failure contingent thinking, intuitive reasoning. In laboratory experiments with 1,236 college students in Nairobi, we implement three incentive levels: no incentives, standard lab payments, very high ...