An important line of recent literature has found gender differences in attitudes toward competition, with men being more likely to choose competitive incentive schemes, even when factors such as ability and risk aversion are controlled for. This paper examines the effect of information on the gender gap in tournament entry. We present experimental evidence that the competitiveness difference be...

Using data from representative population surveys in 17 countries, we find that the lower rate of female business ownership is primarily due to women’s lower propensity to start businesses rather than to differences in survival rates across genders. We show that women are less confident in their entrepreneurial skills, have different social networks and exhibit higher fear of failure than men. ...

Evidence suggests that while women are more likely to go to college than men, they are less likely to go to graduate school. Moreover, in fields like science and engineering, women who do pursue advanced degrees are less likely than men to complete them. This paper compares MBA completion rates for women and men who registered to take the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT). We find that ...

This paper provides new evidence on gender bias in performance evaluations of university teachers. We exploit a quasi-experimental dataset on 19,962 teaching evaluations, where students are randomly allocated to female or male teachers. Despite the fact that neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the teacher’s gender, we find that in particular male students evaluate fema...

The paper analyzes the gender pay gap in private-sector management positions based on German panel data and using fixed-effects models. It deals with the effect of occupational sex segregation on wages, and the extent to which wage penalties for managers in predominantly female occupations are moderated by firm size. Drawing on economic and organizational approaches and the devaluation of women...

Discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls within households in Papua New Guinea is examined using Deaton’s (1989) outlay-equivalent ratio method. Adding a boy to the household reduces expenditure on adult goods by as much as would a nine-tenths reduction in total outlay per member, but girls have no effect on adult goods expenditure. The hypothesis of Haddad and Reardon (...

We show that pregnant women whose first clinic visit coincides with the nurse’s attendance are 58 percentage points more likely to test for HIV and 46 percent more likely to deliver in a hospital. Furthermore, women with high pretest expectations of being HIV positive, whose visit coincides with nurse attendance, are 25 and 7.4 percentage points more likely to deliver in a hospital and receive ...

This paper investigates whether the impact of children on labor market outcomes women relative to men—child penalties—can be explained by biological links between mother and child. We estimate child penalties in adoptive families using event studies around arrival almost 40 years adoption data from Denmark. Short-run are slightly larger for mothers than mothers, but their long-run virtually ide...

We conduct lab experiments to investigate demand for consumption agency in married couples from Pakistan. Most subjects are no better at guessing their spouse's preferences than those of a stranger, suggesting that individual executive has instrumental value. find significant evidence all experiments, varying with the cost and anticipated benefit agency. But often make choices incompatible pure...

A central issue in designing incentive contracts is the decision to reward agents’ input use versus outputs. The trade-off between risk and return innovation production can also lead agents with varying skill levels perform differentially under different contracts. We study this experimentally, observing verifying inputs outputs Indian maternity care. find that both contract types achieve compa...