The literature shows that males react more favorably than females to competitive incentives. This well known result, however, is based on experiments in which participants engage in only a one-shot contest. We conduct a series of math contests in elementary schools which are similar to past...

Using data on 11,000 graduate students from 100 departments over a 20 year period, I test whether graduate student outcomes (graduation rates, time to degree, publication success, and initial job placement) differ based on a student's gender and marital status. I find that married men have...

I use the introduction of a competitive fellowship program for graduate students to test whether men and women respond differently to competition and whether this response depends on the gender mix of the group. Men experienced a 10% increase in performance in response to the program, with the...

We combine newly released individual data from the 1940 full-count census with death records and other information available in family trees to create the largest individual data to date to study the association between years of schooling and age at death. Conditional on surviving to age 35, one...

To investigate whether men and women respond differently to competition and whether this response depends on the gender mix of the group, the author examines outcomes of the Mellon Foundation's Graduate Education Initiative, a competitive fellowship program instituted in 1991 that was aimed at...