Choosing to Compete: How Different Are Girls and Boys? Using a controlled experiment, we examine the role of nurture in explaining the stylized fact that women shy away from competition. Our subjects (students just under 15 years of age) attend publicly-funded single-sex and coeducational schools. We find robust differences between the competitive choices of girls from single-sex and coed schoo...

This paper investigates the effect of CFO gender on corporate tax aggressiveness. Focusing on firms that experience a male-to-female CFO transition, the paper compares those firms’ degree of tax aggressiveness during the preand posttransition periods. Using the probability of tax sheltering, the predicted unrecognized tax benefits, and the discretionary permanent book-tax differences to measure...

Strategic Behavior across Gender: A Comparison of Female and Male Expert Chess Players This paper aims to measure differences in risk behavior among expert chess players. The study employs a panel data set on international chess with 1.4 million games recorded over a period of 11 years. The structure of the data set allows us to use individual fixed-effect estimations to control for aspects suc...

In this paper I present a dynamic structural model of girls’ schooling choices and estimate it using the Mexican PROGRESA database. This structural approach allows evaluating the effectiveness of several policies to increase school reentry rates for girls in low-income households. To increase school attendance among poor children in developing countries, policy makers have implemented condition...

The Lasting Effect of Sex Ratio Imbalance on Marriage and Family: Evidence from World War II in Russia* How does a shock to sex ratios affect marriage markets and fertility? I use the drastic change in sex ratios caused by World War II to identify the effects of unbalanced sex ratios on Russian women. Using unique data from the Soviet archives, the results indicate that male scarcity led to low...

Unexplained Gaps and Oaxaca-Blinder Decompositions We analyze four methods to measure unexplained gaps in mean outcomes: three decompositions based on the seminal work of Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973) and an approach involving a seemingly naïve regression that includes a group indicator variable. Our analysis yields two principal findings. We show that the coefficient on a group indicator va...

We measured human contrast sensitivity to radial frequencies modulated by cylindrical (Jo) and spherical (jo) Bessel profiles. We also measured responses to profiles of jo, j1, j2, j4, j8, and j16. Functions were measured three times by at least three of eight observers using a forced-choice method. The results conform to our expectations that sensitivity would be higher for cylindrical profile...

Why Don’t Women Patent? We investigate women’s underrepresentation among holders of commercialized patents: only 5.5% of holders of such patents are female. Using the National Survey of College Graduates 2003, we find only 7% of the gap in patenting rates is accounted for by women's lower probability of holding any science or engineering degree, because women with such a degree are scarcely mor...

It’s a Boy! Women and Non-Monetary Benefits from a Son in India Son preference is widespread in a number of developing countries. Anecdotal evidence suggests that women may contribute to the persistence of this phenomenon because they derive substantial long-run non-monetary benefits from giving birth to a son in the form of an improvement in their intra-household position. This paper tests thi...

This paper documents several significant correlations between the variability of stock returns, the structure of director compensation and the gender diversity of corporate boards. In a crosssectional sample of boards of directors of 1024 publicly traded firms in fiscal year 1998, we find three robust results: (1) firms facing more variability in their stock returns have fewer women on their bo...