Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has documented that men and women sometimes react differently to acute stressors. We use two...

We examine how multitasking affects performance and check whether women are indeed better at multitasking. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitask, and one where...

A large literature establishes that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly correlated with educational attainment and professional achievement. Isolating the causal effects of these traits on career outcomes is complicated by reverse causality and selection issues. We suggest a new...

Men are generally found to be more willing to compete than women and there is growing evidence that willingness to compete is a predictor of individual and gender differences in career decisions and labor market outcomes. However, most existing evidence comes from the top of the education and...

We assess the predictive power of two measures of competitiveness for education and labor market outcomes using a large, representative survey panel. The first is incentivized and is an online adaptation of the laboratory-based Niederle-Vesterlund measure. The second is an unincentivized survey...

Many professional and educational settings require individuals to be willing and able to perform under time pressure. We use a lab experiment to elicit preferences for working under time pressure in an incentivized way by eliciting the minimum additional payment participants require to complete...

We use a novel approach to explore how people sort into different careers based on their personality skills. We link genetic data from individuals in the Swedish Twin Registry to government register data, making use of new polygenic indices that capture the genetic predispositions of individuals...

A large empirical literature in behavioral economics investigates heterogeneity across individuals and groups in preferences for competition. In this study, we provide a more detailed view on competitiveness by differentiating between four different motivations for entering competitions -...

A large literature establishes that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are strongly correlated with educational attainment and professional achievement. Isolating the causal effects of these traits on career outcomes is made difficult by reverse causality and selection issues. We suggest a...

Are genetic differences between people associated with their career choices? We link data from a large sample of genotyped individuals to Swedish government register data on study major and occupation. Our data contains polygenic indices that summarize genetic variants linked to several...