This paper analyses the relationship between health inequality and the time allocation decisions of workers in six European countries, deriving some important policy implications in the context of income tax systems, regulation of working conditions, and taxes on leisure activities. Using the Multinational Time Use Study, we find that a better perception of own health is associated with more ti...

Gender in Jeopardy!: The Role of Opponent Gender in High-Stakes Competition* Using 4,279 episodes of the popular US game show Jeopardy!, we analyze whether the opponents’ gender is able to explain the gender gap in competitive behavior. Our findings indicate that gender differences disappear when women compete against men. This result is surprising, but emerges with remarkable consistency for t...

Effects of Sexual Preferences on Earnings in the Netherlands A small literature suggests that bisexual and homosexual workers earn less than their heterosexual fellow workers and that a discriminating labor market is partly to blame. In this paper we examine whether sexual preferences affect earnings in the beginning of working careers in the Netherlands. We find (i) that young and highly educa...

This study examines the wage gender gap of young adults in the 1970s, 1980s, and 2000 in the US. Using quantile regression we estimate the gender gap across the entire wage distribution. We also study the importance of high school characteristics in predicting future labor market performance. We conduct analyses for three major racial/ethnic groups in the US: Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, empl...

The Gender Pay Gap for Private Sector Employees in Canada and Britain This paper uses British and Canadian linked employer-employee data to investigate the importance of the workplace for the gender wage gap. Implementing a novel decomposition approach, we find high levels of unexplained wage inequality in the private sector of both countries, which is related to women receiving relatively lowe...

mArch 2017 IZA DP No. 10674 Do Friendship Networks Improve Female Education?* We randomly assign more than 6,000 students from 150 primary schools in Bangladesh to work on math assignments in one of three settings: individually, in groups with random schoolmates, or in groups with friends. The groups consist of four people and are balanced by average cognitive ability and ability distribution. ...

We model parental sex selection and the equilibrium sex ratio. With intrinsic son preference, sex selection results in a male-biased sex ratio. This is ine¢ cient, due to a marriage market congestion externality. Medical innovations that facilitate selection increase ine¢ ciency. If son preference arises endogenously, due to population growth causing an excess of women on the marriage market, s...

This paper is a critical review of the literature concerned with how male behavior affects female outcomes in promoting gender equality. It employs the family as the main unit of analysis as a large part of the gender interactions occurs within this institution. The survey first summarizes recent studies on the distribution of power within the family, and identifies several factors that have al...

A model of how personality traits affect household time and resource allocation decisions and wages is developed and estimated. In the model, households choose between two behavioral modes: cooperative or noncooperative. Spouses receive wage offers and allocate time to supplying labor market hours and to producing a public good. Personality traits, measured by the so-called Big Five traits, can...

This paper experimentally investigates if and how people’s competitiveness depends on their own gender and on the gender of people with whom they interact. Participants are given information about the gender of the co-participant they are matched with, they then choose between a tournament or a piece rate payment scheme, and finally perform a real task. As already observed in the literature, we...