The Determinants of Individual Performance: Empirical Essays on the Importance of Soft Skills and Monetary Incentives

This dissertation consists of three papers. The first paper "Managing the Workload: an Experiment on Individual Decision Making and Performance" experimentally investigates how decision-making in workload management affects individual performance. I designed a laboratory experiment in order to exogenously manipulate the schedule of work faced by each subject and to identify its impact on final performance. Through the mouse click-tracking technique, I also collected interesting behavioral measures on organizational skills. I found that a non-negligible share of individuals performs better under externally imposed schedules than in the unconstrained case. However, such constraints are detrimental for those good in self-organizing. The second chapter, "On the allocation of effort with multiple tasks and piecewise monotonic hazard function", tests the optimality of a scheduling model, proposed in a different literature, for the decisional problem faced in the experiment. Under specific assumptions, I find that such model identifies what would be the optimal scheduling of the tasks in the Admission Test. The third paper "The Effects of Scholarships and Tuition Fees Discounts on Students' Performances: Which Monetary Incentives work Better?" explores how different levels of monetary incentives affect the achievement of students in tertiary education. I used a Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit the assignment of different monetary incentives, to study the effects of such liquidity provision on performance outcomes, ceteris paribus. The results show that a monetary increase in the scholarships generates no effect on performance since the achievements of the recipients are all centered near the requirements for non-returning the benefit. Secondly, students, who are actually paying some share of the total cost of college attendance, surprisingly, perform better than those whose cost is completely subsidized. A lower benefit, relatively to a higher aid, it motivates students to finish early and not to suffer the extra cost of a delayed graduation.

Enhanced financial literacy through financial education and its impact on financial behaviour

This dissertation aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on the effect an enhanced financial literacy, through financial education, has on financial behaviour. We posit that financial literacy is enhanced through financial education courses, but it also significantly impacts the financial behaviour of individuals. Moreover, we argue that improved financial literacy plays a significant role in mitigating behavioural biases and an asset price bubble. Chapter 1 analyzes the impact of a financial education course in enhancing financial literacy in a high- school context. Students at specific schools in Tirana, Albania, are delivered a financial education course, which lasts one academic year. To understand the impact of this financial education course in enhancing financial literacy, PISA (2012) questionnaire on financial literacy is delivered to the students before and after the course is delivered. Chapter 2 analysis the impact of financial literacy in mitigating behavioural biases. We focus on the impact that enhanced financial literacy through the financial education course and financial education plays in reducing the propensity to mental accounting bias. Chapter 3 investigates how financial literacy affects the propensity to an asset price bubble occurrence. We posit that enhanced financial literacy through financial education reduces the probability of an asset price bubble occurrence. We find that financial literacy enhanced through financial education has a significant impact in the financial behaviour of the individuals.