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...

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...

This paper examines the effects of a massive salt iodization program on human capital formation of school-aged children in China. Exploiting province and time variation, we find a strong positive impact on cognition for girls and no effects for boys. For non-cognitive skills, we find the...

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 examines the extent to which human capital theory can explain observed wage differentialsin the Russian Federation. Wage and income dispersion have increased markedly in Russia in the sixyears since the transition began. Some studies conclude that this is an indicator that Russian...

How valuable are cognitive and social abilities for entrepreneurs’ incomes as compared to employees? We answer three questions: (1) To what extent does a composite measure of ability affect an entrepreneur's earnings relative to employees? (2) Do different cognitive abilities (e.g. math...

This paper augments the theory of optimal linear income taxation by taking into account human capital accumulation as a dimension of labor supply. The distribution of earning potentials is endogenous because agents differ in the ability to learn. Taxation affects utilization rates of human...

We combine two empirical observations in a general equilibrium occupational choice model. The first is that entrepreneurs have more control than employees over the employment of and accruals from assets, such as human capital. The second observation is that entrepreneurs enjoy higher returns to...

Estimates of the effect of education on GDP (the social return) have been hard to reconcile with micro evidence on the private return to schooling. We present a simple explanation combining two ideas: imperfect substitution and endogenous skill-biased technological progress and use cross-country...