Gender differences in willingness to compete: The role of public observability

A recent literature emphasizes that gender differences in the labor market may in part be driven by a gender gap in willingness to compete. However, whereas experiments in this literature typically investigate willingness to compete in private environments, real world competitions often have a more public nature, which introduces potential social image concerns. If such image concerns are important, and men and women differ in the degree to which they want to be seen as competitive, making tournament entry decisions publicly observable may further exacerbate the gender gap. We test this prediction using a laboratory experiment (N = 784) that varies the degree to which the decision to compete, and its outcome, is publicly observable. We find that public observability does not alter the magnitude of the gender gap in willingness to compete in an economically or statistically significant way.     

Gender bias in job referrals: An experimental test

Employee referral programs, while efficient for the employer, have been shown to amplify sex-based occupational segregation in labor markets because of the tendency of workers to refer people of the same gender. We implement a controlled laboratory experiment that precludes any concern for network composition or reputation effects in referral choice. In this way, our experimental design allows us to disentangle statistical discrimination, preferences, and implicit same-gender bias. Our data suggest that women tend to favor women when choosing a candidate, whereas men do not attach much importance to the gender of potential candidates. We deduce from our various treatments that same-gender referrals are mainly driven by preferences in competitive environments and implicit same-gender bias in cooperative environments. Our findings add to the existing literature by highlighting that gendered networks alone fail to explain the observed gender homophily in referred-referrer pairs.     

Parenthood,risk attitudes and risky behavior

This study analyzes how risk attitudes change when individuals experience the major life event of becoming a parent by using longitudinal data for a large and representative sample of individuals from Germany. The analysis uses a survey-based measure of risk aversion. The estimation is based on an individual fixed effects model similar to an event study. On average, men and women experience a considerable increase in risk aversion around the time of first childbirth. This increase already starts as early as two years before they become parents, it is largest shortly after childbirth and it disappears when the child becomes older. When analyzing risky choices, the results indicate that risky labor market behavior remains unaffected by parenthood.     

Procrastination, prompts, and preferences: Evidence from daily records of self-directed learning activities

This paper presents evidence showing that a libertarian paternalistic intervention having significant but uneven effects on the student procrastination of a coursework assignment. We observe the degree of procrastination in a language course at a Japanese university with individuals’ electronic records of daily activities. With a quasi-experiment that generates variations in the frequency of interventions and the preference of students towards the course, we examine the effects of in-class verbal prompts by an instructor on the timing of task completion. We find that prompts affect behavior, especially when reinforced, but the responsiveness depends on the class preferences and the timing of interventions.