Three essays in applied economics.

Summary This thesis addresses several questions related to the economics of education and the economics of teams. In the first chapter, based on a collaboration with Laurent Rossignol, we focus on school guidance. We highlight the existence of orientation biases in the French educational system: the orientation of students does not depend only on their academic performance but also on their gender and social background. Our main contribution is to distinguish the impact of students' aspirations from the impact of teachers' ratings and recommendations on these orientation biases. The second chapter, co-authored with Antoine Chapsal, aims to understand some of the incentives and psychological effects associated with teamwork, using data on squash team championships. We show that players value participating in the success of their team, which partly explains why incentives to exert effort are stronger in collective contexts than in individual contexts. The third chapter, stemming from initial work with Rodrigo Lopez-Kolkovsky, aims to develop an estimation procedure to measure individual team productivity, using data on European soccer. We then confront this measure with the market value of players and show that Black players are discriminated against in the market.