This discussion paper has led to a publication in the <I>Journal of Labor Economics</I>, 2013, 32(2), 305-326.<P> 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...</p></i>

How do people react to setbacks and successes? I introduce a new measure of challenge-seeking to determine the effect of winning and losing in a competition on the willingness to seek further challenges. Participants in a lab experiment compete in two-person tournaments and are then informed of...

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,...

While the impact of globalization on income inequality has received a lot of attention, little is known about its effect on the gender wage gap (GWG). This study argues that there is a systematic difference in the GWG between exporting firms and non-exporters. By the virtue of being exposed to...

Using the New Immigrant Survey, we investigate the impact of immigrant women’s own labor supply prior to migrating and female labor supply in their source country on their labor supply and wages in the US. Women migrating from higher female labor supply countries work more in the US. Most of...

The abysmal economic performance by African States in the past three decades is attributable to a host of known factors – mismanagement of resources, graft, and bureaucratic corruption (Mauro, 1995); but of all the known culprits that have so far suppressed economic growth, none are more...

Using the recent Wage Structure Survey 2010, this article examines the public-private sector wage gaps in Spain across the whole earnings distribution and the incidence of the gender gap in both sectors of the economy. Firstly, we find that that there is positive wage premium to public sector...

This study is encouraged to apply the methodology of economics to investigate the issue of gender selection of the traditional parents in China, which has been widely noted from the perspective of sociology. It is firstly argued that traditional society of China is a good object for economic...

The process of development in the developing countries had, by and large, marginalised women and deprived them of the control over resources and authority within the household, without lightening the heavy burden of their ‘traditional duties’. The last century was however marked by a...

In her recent study Bobbitt-Zeher (2007) takes on the important task of identifying the contribution of educational factors relative to non-educational factors in the making of the gender income gap among the college-educated and finds that “family formation has virtually no effect on the...