boys will still be boys gender differences in trading activity are not due to differences in over confidence abstract the fact that men trade more than women in financial markets has been attributed to men s overconfidence however evidence supporting this view is only indirect we directly test this conjecture experimentally by measuring confidence using monetary incentives before participants trade in a simulated market we find that men are more confident than women in our trading task men also trade more and they hold larger and less diversified portfolios than women however we do not find that differences in confidence explain any portion of the gender gap in trading activity we explore alternative candidate channels such as risk aversion financial literacy or competitiveness but find that these factors are also unlikely to play a role

better monetary control may increase the inflationary bias of policy textabstractexplores the implications of imperfect monetary control and uncertainty about the trade off between output and inflation to discretionary policy impact of imperfect control of money growth on policymakers incentive to create surprises consequences of imperfect control of money growth for optimal monetary policy welfare effects of uncertainty about the extent to which inflation affect output

why can t a woman bid more like a man abstract we investigate gender differences and menstrual cycle effects in first price and second price sealed bid auctions with independent private values in a laboratory setting we find that women bid significantly higher and earn significantly less than men do in the first price auction while we find no evidence of a gender difference in bidding or earnings in the second price auction focusing on the first price auction we find that while the gender gap in bidding and earnings persists over the entire course of the menstrual cycle bidding of contraceptive pill users follows a sine like pattern throughout the menstrual cycle with higher than average bidding in the follicular phase and lower than average bidding in the luteal phase in comparison pill non users have a flat bidding profile throughout the cycle

running in the family parental role models in entrepreneurship it is well established that children of self employed parents are more likely to become self employed themselves but the reasons are still hotly debated using danish register data we investigate the importance and workings of parental role models for the probability of becoming self employed we find that the effect of a self employed father mother is much higher for males females these results are statistically and economically very significant and they survive when we control for parental wealth and work experience from the parents firms and when we exclude cases where the offspring takes over the family business this points to a strong role for parental role models in explaining why self employment runs in the family

the gender gap in early career wage growth in the uk the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but ten years after labour market entry there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points this article explores the reason for this gender gap in early career wage growth considering three main hypotheses human capital job shopping and psychological theories human capital factors can explain about 11 log points job shopping about 1 5 log points and the psychological theories up to 4 5 log points depending on the specification but a substantial unexplained gap remains women who have continuous full time employment have had no children and express no desire to have them earn about 8 log points less than equivalent men after 10 years in the labour market

gender and competition at a young age gender gaps may be observed in a variety of economic and social environments one of the possible determining factors is that men are more competitive than women and so when the competitiveness of the environment increases the performance of men increases relative to that of women we test this hypothesis in a field study conducted with 9 year old children running on a track they first run alone and then in pairs over a short distance with different gender composition of the pairs the results support the hypothesis that performance in competition varies according to gender when children ran alone there was no difference in performance in competition boys but not girls improved their performance this finding relates to the discussion regarding single sex schools the outcomes of examinations in a mixed sex school can show a gender gap in favor of boys even when this gap does not reflect actual abilities girls who are as talented as boys will end up performing worse just because they are not as competitive and will not achieve as high scores in examinations as boys

do professionals choke under pressure high rewards or the threat of severe punishment provide strong motivation but also create psychological pressure which might induce performance decrements by analyzing the performance of professional football players in penalty kick situations the paper provides empirical evidence for the existence of detrimental incentive effects two pressure variables are considered in particular 1 the importance of success and 2 the presence of spectators there are plenty of situations in which pressure arises in the workplace knowing how individuals perform under pressure conditions is crucial because it has implications for the design of the workplace and the design of incentive schemes

gender differences in market competitiveness in a real workplace evidence from performance based pay tournaments among teachers recent lab and field experiments suggest that women are less effective than men in a competitive environment in this paper i examine how individual performance in a real work place is affected by a competitive environment and by its gender mix the competition is among math english and language teachers who participated in a rank order tournament that rewarded teachers with large cash bonuses based on the test performance of their classes the evidence suggest that the average ranking winning rate and awarded prize did not differ by gender nor between teachers in competition groups with only female teachers or with both genders i also find that the direct impact of the bonus program on students outcomes did not vary by male and female teachers or by the type of competitive environment in terms of gender mix of the participants as for mechanisms that can explain these results i found no differences by either gender or by the gender mix of the competition group in teachers awareness and familiarity with the program and its rules and in effort and teaching methods women though were more pessimistic about the effectiveness of teachers performance pay and more realistic than men about their likelihood of winning bonuses

the importance of being confident gender career choice and willingness to compete abstract this study investigates the extent to which gender differences in choosing to enter competitive tournaments are due to women s lower taste for competition or differences in confidence we examine three types of confidence and find that confidence measured by expected ranking is the most important determinant of decisions to enter tournaments conditional on ability this measure eliminates gender differences in winner take all tournaments and when entered with risk measures eliminates differences in ranked compensation tournaments when the sample is split by career choice there are no gender differences for students in stem fields and in the humanities and the social sciences differences can be explained by confidence however for business school students gender differences in willingness to compete in winner take all tournaments persist even after accounting for risk aversion and confidence men in business set themselves apart from the rest of the population men and women alike with the highest levels of tournament entry and the most positive performance responses to competition

gender differences in competitiveness and risk taking comparing children in colombia and sweden we explore gender differences in preferences for competition and risk among children aged 912 in colombia and sweden two countries differing in gender equality according to macro indices we include four types of tasks that vary in gender stereotyping when looking at competitiveness running skipping rope math and word search we find that boys and girls are equally competitive in all tasks and all measures in colombia unlike the consistent results in colombia the results in sweden are mixed with some indication of girls being more competitive than boys in some tasks in terms of performance change whereas boys are more likely to choose to compete in general boys in both countries are more risk taking than girls with a smaller gender gap in sweden

social identity and inequality the impact of china s hukou system abstract we conduct an experimental study to investigate the causal impact of social identity on individuals performance under incentives we focus on china s household registration hukou system which favors urban residents and discriminates against rural residents in resource allocation our results show that making individuals hukou identity salient significantly reduces the performance of rural migrant students relative to their local urban counterparts on an incentivized cognitive task and consequently significantly lowers their relative ranking in the earnings distribution under the piece rate regime however the impact of hukou identity salience is insignificant in the tournament regime suggesting that its negative effect on migrant students performance may be mitigated when competition is introduced the results demonstrate the impact of institutionally imposed social identity on individuals economic performance and potentially on inequality

how uncertainty and ambiguity in tournaments affect gender differences in competitive behavior abstract tournament incentives prevail in labor markets yet the number of tournament winners is often unclear to competitors while it is hard to measure how this uncertainty affects work performance and willingness to compete in the field it can be studied in a controlled lab experiment we present a novel experiment where subjects can compete against each other but the number of winners is either uncertain but with known probabilities or ambiguous with unknown probabilities for different numbers of winners we compare these two conditions to a control treatment with a known number of winners we find that ambiguity induces a significant increase in the performance of men who choose to compete while we observe no change for women men also increase their willingness to enter competition in the presence of ambiguity overall both effects contribute to men winning the tournament significantly more often than women under uncertainty and ambiguity these findings suggest that management should make tournament conditions transparent and information available in order to prevent gender disparities from increasing under uncertainty and ambiguity

gender differences in response to big stakes it is commonly perceived that increasing incentives improves performance however the reaction to increased incentives might differ between men and women leading to gender differences in performance in a natural experiment we study the gender difference in performance resulting from changes in stakes we use detailed information on the performance of high school students and exploit the variation in the stakes of tests which range from 5 to 27 of the final grade we find that female students outperform male students in all tests but to a relatively larger degree when the stakes are low the gender gap disappears in tests taken at the end of high school which count for 50 of the university entry grade jel d03 j16 i21 c30

the effects of competition and equal treatment laws on gender wage differentials discrimination if it is inefficient can be eliminated by competition in most countries it is also forbidden by law this paper evaluates the influence of economic and legal factors on the portion of male female wage differentials that is not explained by other worker characteristics and may be due to discrimination we use a new international data set of suitable gender wage gap measures constructed from the results of existing studies meta analysis of the data shows that increased competition and adoption of international conventions concerning equal treatment laws both reduce gender wage gaps while legislation that prevents women from performing strenuous or dangerous jobs tends to increase it doris weichselbaumer and rudolf winter ebmer

license to cheat voluntary regulation and ethical behavior although monitoring and regulation can be used to combat socially costly unethical conduct their intended targets can often avoid regulation or hide their behavior this surrenders at least part of the effectiveness of regulatory policies to firms and individuals decisions to voluntarily submit to regulation we study individuals decisions to avoid monitoring or regulation and thus enhance their ability to engage in unethical conduct we conduct a laboratory experiment in which participants engage in a competitive task and can decide between having the opportunity to misreport their performance or having their performance verified by an external monitor to study the effect of social factors on the willingness to be subject to monitoring we vary whether participants make this decision simultaneously with others or sequentially as well as whether the decision is private or public our results show that the opportunity to avoid being submitted to regulation produces more unethical conduct than situati

orchestrating impartiality the impact of blind auditions on female musicians a change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras adoption of blind auditions with a screen to conceal the candidate s identity from the jury provides a test for sex biased hiring using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed effects framework we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras

why women don t run experimental evidence on gender differences in political competition aversion abstract women s underrepresentation in leadership positions has been well documented but the reasons behind it are not well understood we carry out a field experiment to test a prominent theory about the source of the gender gap in leadership ambition women s higher aversion to competitive environments using politics as a context for our study we employ two distinct subject pools highly politically active individuals and workers from an online labor market we find that priming individuals to consider the competitive nature of politics has a strong negative effect on women s interest in political office but not on men s interest hence significantly increasing the gender gap in leadership ambition

the gender of opponents explaining gender differences in performance and risk taking abstract analyzing 8169 contestants over 32 years of the us game show jeopardy we find that women compete more aggressively become marginally more competitive and take on more risk when paired against men specifically a woman is more likely to win a jeopardy episode and within the show to respond to a clue once responding she is also marginally more likely to respond correctly potentially most surprising even the sizeable gender gap in risk taking analyzing daily double wagering decisions disappears once a woman competes in an otherwise all male field of competitors men on the other hand wager significantly less when paired against women only but the gender of opponents does not affect their competitive performance otherwise our rich sample allows us to control for a host of potentially confounding factors and player fixed effects thereby eliminating potential biases from unobservable individual characteristics our findings are consistent with an explanation that emphasizes an adaptation to social norms applied to gender

the state street mile age and gender differences in competition aversion in the field i introduction gender differences in competitiveness are hypothesized to play a role in a wide array of economic outcomes including the low representation of women among fortune 500 chief executive officers bertrand and hallock 2001 niederle and vesterlund 2007 although psychologists have a long history of documenting the reluctance of girls or women to enter competitions economists have begun to study this phenomenon only recently psychologists have previously emphasized the tendency of women to underestimate their future performance on a number of different tasks deaux 1979 pallier 2003 1 careful experimental studies by economists reveal that in a laboratory setting a number of different reasons underlie women s lower inclination to compete these reasons include not only women s tendency to underestimate their own ability but also greater aversion to risk and uncertainty about their ability eckel 2008 eckel and grossman 2008 gupta poulsen and villeval 2011 niederle and yestrumskas 2008 niederle and vesterlund 2007 control for these and other factors in a carefully designed experiment that provides strong evidence of a distinct preference to avoid the act of competition against men 2 the purpose of this paper is to provide evidence of competition aversion in a natural setting somewhere between the simplicity of a laboratory experiment and the full complexity and ambiguity of a labor market the behavior of runners in a race suggests that female competition aversion can be detected even in single sex situations the state street mile race offers both male and female participants a choice between two different levels of competition those who believe they have superior ability relative to participants of the same gender are encouraged to enter a highly competitive high profile elite race with cash prizes other participants those who believe they are slower runners and those who simply prefer a lower level of competition pay the same entry fee and run the same course in age group races with no cash prize systematic gender differences are observed in the relationship between true ability as measured by actual time to run the mile observed ex post and the decision to enter the more competitive elite race while fast young men are almost certain to enter the highly competitive race a sizable minority of the fast young women do not choose to do so niederle and vesterlund 2007 argue that reluctance to compete against men is particularly costly to high ability women because this group has the most to gain from entering the competition this was true for the mixed gender tournament they studied however we find that on this single sex task the very fastest women are quite likely to enter the elite race it is the middle range above the qualifying standard but below the group most likely to win where the largest gender differences in behavior are observed thus although our results are consistent with experimental work suggesting that women tend to have competition averse preferences they also demonstrate that in some instances there might not be very much economic significance in this context the fastest women respond to financial incentives and the economic consequences of the preference for competition aversion are therefore quite small in addition to the gender difference this analysis identifies a reluctance of older qualified runners to enter the more competitive race despite the fact that over the age of 40 winners are chosen based on age graded times this finding differs from recent experimental work by charness and villeval 2009 which shows that younger and older field subjects employees below 30 years old and employees of the same firm above 50 years old were equally willing to select a competitive payment option in the state street mile the propensity to compete in the highly competitive elite race among older men is similar to that observed for younger women while older women are the least likely and young men are the most likely to enter a highly competitive elite race

men women and competition an experimental test of behavior this study reports a series of experiments that examine outcomes when agents are able to choose between a payment scheme that rewards based on absolute performance i e piece rate and a scheme that rewards based on relative performance i e a tournament we test for the presence and persistence of gender differences in performance and the rate of entry into the tournament option and whether these differences are sensitive to the structure of the tournament rewards in the winner take all wta condition only the best performer in the tournament for each round received a payment 4 50 in the graduated tournament condition the same payment 4 50 was divided among the first second and third finishers in the tournament in the wta condition men showed significantly lower forecast errors than women in addition a clear sorting effect occurs in the wta condition in early rounds of the wta condition male entrants into the tournament show significantly lower forecast errors than female tournament entrants however the difference disappears over time after controlling for forecasting skill gender did not predict entry into the tournament for the wta condition however lower forecasting skill reduced the probability of entry in the graduated tournament the situation was reversed men entered the tournament at significantly higher rates even after controlling for skill forecasting skill had no impact on the decision to enter the tournament while the average male entrant to the tournament had lower forecast errors than the average female entrant the men entered at much higher rates as a consequence men were much more likely than women to enter the tournament too frequently

incentives versus sorting in tournaments evidence from a field experiment existing field evidence on rank order tournaments typically does not allow disentangling incentive and sorting effects we conduct a field experiment illustrating the confounding effect students in an introductory microeconomics course selected themselves into tournaments with low medium or high prizes for the best score at the final exam nonexperimental analysis of the results would suggest that higher rewards induce higher productivity but a comparison between treatment and control groups reveals that there is no such effect this stresses the importance of nonrandom sorting into tournaments

performance in competitive environments gender differences even though the provision of equal opportunities for men and women has been a priority in many countries large gender differences prevail in competitive high ranking positions suggested explanations include discrimination and differences in preferences and human capital in this paper we present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor women may be less effective than men in competitive environments even if they are able to perform similarly in non competitive environments in a laboratory experiment we observe as we increase the competitiveness of the environment a significant increase in performance for men but not for women this results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments while there is no gap when participants are paid according to piece rate this effect is stronger when women have to compete against men than in single sex competitive environments this suggests that women may be able to perform in competitive environments per se

the incentive effects of affirmative action in a real effort tournament abstract affirmative action policies bias tournament rules in order to provide equal opportunities to a group of competitors who have a disadvantage they cannot be held responsible for its implementation affects the underlying incentive structure which might induce lower performance by participants and additionally result in a selected pool of tournament winners that is less efficient in this paper we study the empirical validity of such concerns in a case where the disadvantage affects capacities to compete we conducted real effort tournaments between pairs of children from two similar schools who systematically differed in how much training they received ex ante on the task at hand contrary to the expressed concerns our results show that the implementation of affirmative action did not result in a significant performance loss for either advantaged or disadvantaged subjects instead it rather enhanced the performance for a large group of participants moreover affirmative action resulted in a more equitable tournament winner pool where half of the selected tournament winners came from the originally disadvantaged group hence the negative selection effects due to the biased tournament rules were at least partially offset by performance enhancing incentive effects

the tradeoff between performance and quitting in high power tournaments tournaments may be characterized by the performance they induce as well as by the rate of quitting and dropouts of participants although most of the attention in the literature is on the performance induced by high power incentives there are many daily situations in which dropouts and quitting are a major concern using a field experiment in schools and a model of dynamic tournament we examine the effect of different levels of rewards on the rate of quitting our experiment indicates that there is a possible tradeoff between performance and quitting strong incentives tournaments induced participants to exert more effort and exhibit a better performance but at the same time it induces a higher rate of quitting we present a multi stage tournament model that gives rise to a similar characterization jel c93 c73 d8 j30