I study how gender differences in willingness to compete evolve over time in response to experience. Participants in a lab experiment perform the same real-effort task over several rounds. In each round, they have to choose between piece-rate remuneration and a winner-takes-all competition. At...

This paper experimentally analyzes the determinants of compliance in a cheating game. The results show that men are less compliant than women. We demonstrate that social value orientation predicts differences in cheating and explains the gender differences. Individualistic men cheat more than...

Using a unique data on sub-Saharan Africa, we show that even though in absolute terms men pay more bribes, in relative terms, women are more likely to be involved in bribery or do favors that benefit the household. Additionally, running country specific regressions shows that for 65% of the...

Gender differences in voting patterns and political attitudes towards redistribution are well-documented. The experimental gender literature suggests several plausible behavioral explanations behind these differences, relating to gender differences in confidence concerning future relative income...

We ran a field experiment in a Dutch retail chain consisting of 128 stores. In a random sample of these stores, we introduced short-term sales competitions among subsets of stores. We find that sales competitions have a large effect on sales growth, but only in stores where the store's manager...

We use fluctuations of female sex hormones occurring naturally over the menstrual cycle or induced by hormonal contraceptives to determine the importance of sex hormones in explaining gender differences in competitiveness. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a simple arithmetics task...

In this paper I compare the effect of entering parenthood on the spousal income gaps in lesbian and heterosexual couples using Swedish population wide register data. Comparing couples with similar pre-childbirth income gaps, a difference-in-differences strategy is used to estimate the impact of...

Competition involves two dimensions, rivalry for resources and social-status ranking. In our experiment we exclude the first dimension and investigate gender differences in the preference for status ranking. Participants perform a task under non-rivalry incentives. Before doing so, individuals...

We conduct three lab experiments and use field data from the Dutch Math Olympiad to study how the gender gap in willingness to compete evolves in response to experience. The main result is that women are more likely than men to stop competing if they lose. In the Dutch Math Olympiad, this means...

The authors adopt the Five-Factor Model of personality structure to explore how personalityaffected the earnings of a large group of men and women who graduated from Wisconsin highschools in 1957 and were re-interviewed in 1992. All five basic traits–extroversion,...