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Gender differences in competitiveness are often discussed as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes.We correlate an incentivized measure of competitiveness with an important career choice of secondary school students in the Netherlands.At the age of 15, these students have to pick one out of four study profiles, which vary in how prestigious they are.While boys and girls have very similar levels of academic ability, boys are substantially more likely than girls to choose more prestigious profiles.We find that competitiveness is as important a predictor of profile choice as gender.More importantly, up to 23 percent of the gender difference in profile choice can be attributed to gender differences in competitiveness.This lends support to the extrapolation of laboratory findings on competitiveness to labor market settings.
How does income affect religiousness? Using self-collected survey data, we estimate the effects of income on religious behaviour. As a source of exogenous income variation we use a change in the eligibility criteria for a government cash transfer in Ecuador and apply a regression discontinuity strategy to estimate causal effects. We find significant effects of income on religiousness. Households that earn more go to church more often. Households that earn more are also more likely to be members of an evangelical community rather than of the mainstream catholic church.
We present evidence on the role of the social environment for the development of gender differ-
ences in competitiveness and earnings expectations. First, we document that the gender gap
in competitiveness and earnings expectations is more pronounced among adolescents with low
socioeconomic status (SES). We further document that there is a positive association between
the competitiveness of mothers and their daughters, but not between the competitiveness of
mothers and their sons. Second, we show that a randomized mentoring intervention that
exposes low-SES children to predominantly female role models causally affects girls' willing-
ness to compete and narrows both the gender gap in competitiveness as well as the gender
gap in earnings expectations. Together, the results highlight the importance of the social
environment in shaping willingness to compete and earnings expectations at a young age.
One of the many different things about Paul Gauguin was that he painted religious pictures. Religious paintings by the major artists of the late Nineteenth Century are undoubtedly few, and few of the major artists, even in private, were concerned with religion. For Gauguin, however, religion played an important role in his art and in his life. Fundamentally he was, I believe, a spiritual man, searching for Faith, even though his moral conduct and his theological opinions might have shocked contemporary Christians.
Abstract We expand the scope of the literature on willingness to compete by asking how it varies with academic ability and whether and how it predicts career choices at different ability levels. The literature so far has mainly focused on career choices made by students at the top of the ability distribution, particularly in academic institutions. We experimentally elicit the willingness to compete of 1500 Swiss lower-secondary school students at all ability levels and link it to the study choice that students make upon finishing compulsory school. Our analysis of the relationship between willingness to compete and the study choice considers the full set of study options, including the options in vocational education. We find that willingness to compete predicts which study option high-ability students choose, not only among academic specializations but also among vocational careers, and, importantly, it also predicts whether low-ability boys pursue upper-secondary education upon finishing compulsory schooling. Our second main contribution is to systematically explore how willingness to compete varies with academic ability. We find that high-ability boys, but not girls, are substantially more willing to compete compared to all other children. As a consequence, the gender gap in willingness to compete is significantly lower among low-ability students than among high-ability students. Overall, our study highlights that insights from the literature on willingness to compete are relevant for a broader set of policy questions, populations and choices.
Abstract 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 question eliciting general competitiveness. Both measures are strong predictors of income, occupation, level of education and field of study. The predictive power of the new unincentivized measure is robust to controlling for other traits, including risk attitudes, confidence and the Big Five personality traits. For most outcomes, the predictive power of competitiveness exceeds that of the other traits.
