Abstract Team production is increasingly important for economic outcomes, yet the factors driving team performance remain poorly understood. This paper examines the influence of psychological factors on team performance using data from the top divisions of the five major European football leagues, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of home advantage. Home advantage has been widely studied, and research has reached a point where further progress is challenging. This study offers a modest but insightful contribution by distinguishing between goals and expected goals to separate the creation of scoring opportunities from the conversion of those chances into actual goals, which reflects individual performance. The analysis shows that home teams not only generate more scoring chances but also convert them into goals more efficiently. In the absence of a stadium crowd, home advantages in goals and expected goals are substantially reduced, and the home advantage in the conversion of expected goals into actual goals is virtually absent. These findings suggest that psychological factors can be stimulating and have a positive effect on productivity, rather than workers choking under pressure and thereby decreasing their productivity.

Abstract This study estimates the impact of relative age (i.e., the difference in classmates’ ages) on both the speed and quality of individuals’ transition from education to the labour market, and investigates whether and how this impact passes through characteristics of students’ educational careers—topics that have been largely overlooked in prior work. We use rich data pertaining to schooling and to labour market outcomes one year after graduation to conduct instrumental variables analyses. We find that a one-year increase in relative age increases the likelihood of (i) being employed then by 3.5 percentage points (baseline 91.2%), (ii) having a permanent contract by 5.1 percentage points (baseline 42.6%), and (iii) having full-time employment by 6.5 percentage points (baseline 79.5%). These relative age effects are partly mediated by intermediate outcomes such as having had a schooling delay at the age of sixteen or taking on student jobs. The final mediator is particularly notable as no earlier studies examined relative age effects on student employment.

Abstract We study whether living in a student room as a tertiary education student (instead of commuting between one’s parental residence and college or university) affects exam results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study this relationship beyond cross-sectional analysis. That is, we exploit rich longitudinal data on Belgian freshmen students’ residential status and exam scores to control for observed heterogeneity as well as for individual fixed (or random) effects. We find that after correcting for unobserved heterogeneity, the association found in earlier contributions disappears. This finding of no significant impact of living in a student room on exam results is robust for other methods used for correcting endogeneity bias including instrumental variable techniques.

Abstract This work draws on the concept of hollowing and fortifying to examine the ability of an industry to self-regulate and how the stringency of a private regulatory institution works over time. Although previous research has shown that such institutions sustain themselves by balancing the reduction of stringency (gaining more support from industry participants) and increasing stringency (gaining more support from non-industry stakeholders), we present a historical case in which such institutions can also sustain by only increasing stringency. We conduct a longitudinal, qualitative analysis of news articles, official government records and other documents related to the Dutch Securities Institute, the self-regulatory organization in the Dutch securities industry. Our findings show how a self-regulatory institution can function through mere fortifying actions. The results also suggest a difference between stakeholders in their effectiveness to affect self-regulatory institutions.