Competitiveness and Career Choices

The first economic experimental paper on gender differences in competitiveness is nearing its 10 year anniversary: "Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences" by Uri Gneezy, Muriel Niederle and Aldo Rustichini. With Lise Vesterlund I then published a paper where we do not assess the intensive margin but rather the extensive margin of gender differences in competitiveness "Do Women Shy away from Competition? Do Men Compete too Much?".

I was fortunate that this work received a lot of attention and generated a whole literature (for an overview see  Niederle, Muriel and Lise Vesterlund, “Gender and Competition”). We also received a lot of citations from labor economists mentioning that gender differences in psychological attributes, such as competitiveness, may be a reason for the gender gap in education and labor market outcomes.

However, there has been no satisfactory direct evidence linking gender differences in psychological attributes such as competitiveness to education and labor market outcomes. That is we have no good evidence on the external relevance of competitiveness. This is what  Buser, Thomas, Muriel Niederle and Hessel Oosterbeek, “Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices,” does: We examine how competitiveness is associated with education. The abstract reads: 
           "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."

More work is needed to make sure these findings are robust. 

Stay tuned for more on gender differences and also for more on lab to field papers.

Competitiveness and Age

There are now a few papers that look at gender differences in competitiveness in relation to age.

Taking the findings of all those papers seriously, suggests that selection could be a huge problem, and that basically one might be able to get whatever result one wanted.

The first paper I am aware of is "Competitiveness Across the Life Span: The Feisty Fifties", Ulrich Mayr, Dave Wozniak, Casey Davidson, David Kuhns, and William T. Harbaugh, Psychology and Aging, 2012 Jun;27(2):278-85.

The abstract reads:
Existing theories on life span changes in confidence or motivation suggest that individuals’ preferences to enter competitive situations should gradually decline with age. We examined competitive preferences in a field experiment using real financial stakes in 25- to 75-year-olds (N=543). The critical dependent variable was whether participants chose to perform a simple mental arithmetic task either under a piece-rate payment schedule (i.e., $.25 per solved item) or a competitive payment schedule ($.50 per solved item if the overall score is better than that of a randomly selected opponent, $0 otherwise). Results revealed that competitive preferences increased across the life span until they peaked around age 50, and dropped thereafter. We also found that throughout, men had a substantially larger preference for competing than women extending previous findings on college-aged participants. The age/gender differences in preferences were neither accounted for by actual differences in performance nor individuals’ subjective confidence. This first systematic attempt to characterize age differences in competitive behavior suggests that a simple decline conception of competitiveness needs to be reconsidered.

The summarizing figure is

The second paper is a new working paper by J. Flory, U. Gneezy, K.Leonard and J. List, "Sex, Competitiveness, and Investment in Offspring: On the Origin of Preferences" comes to very different conclusions (and fails to cite the former paper):

Their abstract reads:
Gender differences in competitive behavior have received much attention,  demonstrating a systematic gap between males’ and females’ tendencies to  compete. Theories predict a biological factor linked to an evolutionary response to the different paths to reproductive success for men and women. Since strategies for reproductive success change over the female life-cycle, the gender gap is predicted to be largest for young adults but after menopause women should be as  competitive as men. Using data drawn from two very different societies, we find  strong support for this theoretical prediction: competitiveness in women is tightly linked to their biological roles in childrearing.

Their main figure is

The third paper I know of on age and competitiveness, considers years of work experience instead of age (though the two are highly correlated). It is a paper by Andreas Leibbrandt, Uri Gneezy, and John A. List, "Rise and fall of competitiveness in individualistic and collectivistic societies", PNAS, 2012.

Their abstract reads:
Competitiveness pervades life: plants compete for sunlight and water, animals for territory and food, and humans for mates and income. Herein we investigate human competitiveness with a natural experiment and a set of behavioral experiments. We compare competitiveness in traditional fishing societies where local natural forces determine whether fishermen work in isolation or in collectives. We find sharp evidence that fishermen from individualistic societies are far more competitive than fishermen from collectivistic societies, and that this difference emerges with work experience. These findings suggest that humans can evolve traits to specific needs, support the idea that socio-ecological factors play a decisive role for individual competitiveness, and provide evidence how individualistic and collectivistic societies shape economic behavior.

Their main figure is

Furthermore, they find that for women:
"Women in the individualistic societies who do not fish were as competitive as women in the collectivistic societies who do not fish (15% vs. 14.7%, Fisher’s exact test, P = 1, n = 66), suggesting that traits that evolve at work do not easily spread to other society members"

There is strong suggestive evidence that experience and age are highly correlated:

"On average our subjects were 38.2 y (±13.3 SD, n = 289), lived for 28.3 y (±15.8 SD, n=289) in the same fishing society, and had worked for 18.4 y (±12.4 SD, n=289, variable=work experience) professionally as fishermen. In both settings, fishermen work for most of the year, and for 5 to 7 d a week. They are heavily dependent on the shrimp and fish resources: there are very few other types of jobs in these societies, and fishing is often the only possible"


Of course taking these results, suggests that gender differences in competitiveness can either increase or decrease, it may depend on the work experience of subjects at hand...

Some curious aside:

• Of papers 2 and 3 (that came after paper 1) only paper 2 cites paper 1.
• Papers 2 and 3 do not cite each other...

Correlates of Competitiveness and Gender Differences

I recently came across the following paper by Ingvild Almas, Alexander W. Cappelen, Kjell G. Salvanes,
Erik Ø. Sørensen and Bertil Tungodden "Willingness to Compete: Family Matters"

The abstract reads:

"This paper studies the results from a lab experiment with a representative sample of adolescents in Norway, where we link behavioral data from the experiment to official register data about family background. We show that family background is fundamental in two important ways. First, children from families where parents have low income and education are less willing to compete, even when controlling for confidence, performance, risk- and time preferences, social preferences, and psychological traits. Second, family background is crucial for understanding the observed large gender difference in willingness to compete. Girls from well-off families are much less willing to compete than boys, whereas we do not find any gender difference among children with low socioeconomic background."


I long suspected that differences in gender differences in competitiveness may be particularly stark among the "upper tail". It would be nice to know to what extent such differences are driven by an increase in competitiveness by males.

There is still a lot to be understood about the determinants of gender differences in competitiveness  and competitiveness in general and correlations with other variables. This seems even more important now that we have seen that competitiveness may predict education choices, which, of course, in turn can affect economic outcomes, see my former blogpost: Competitiveness and Career Choices

Competitiveness and Wages of MBA's

This is a paper I always wanted to write:

Reuben, E., P. Sapienza, and L. Zingales: "Taste for competition and the gender gap among young business professionals,"

There are two reasons I find this work interesting: First, it related to a literature that helps understand what psychological traits are linked to labor market outcomes. Second, it shows the external relevance of competitiveness: see also my paper with Thomas Buser and Hessel Oosterbeek:  “Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2014, 129 (3): 1409-1447, and see also my former blogposts  here and here)

The abstract reads:

"Using an incentivized measure of individuals’ taste for competition, this paper investigates whether this taste explains subsequent gender differences in earnings and industry choice in a sample of high ability MBA graduates. We find that “competitive” individuals earn 9% more than their less competitive counterparts do. Moreover, gender differences in taste for competition explain around 10% of the overall gender gap. We also find that competitive individuals are more likely to work in high-paying industries nine years later, which suggests that the relation between taste for competition and earnings persists in the long run. Lastly, we find that the effect of taste for competition emerges over time when MBAs and firms interact with each other."

Their main results can be seen in the following figures and tables:
First even among MBA's it seems there is a gender gap in tournament entry.

While risk aversion and confidence can account for some of that gender gap in tournament entry, a substantial gender gap remains.

Second, male MBA's have a higher salary after graduation than female MBA's.

Now, to assess the external relevance of competitiveness:

Competitiveness is highly positively correlated with higher earnings.

Finally, competitiveness remains an important variable even controlling for gender, and can account for about 10% of the gender gap in earnings.

They write:
"How important is the role of taste for competition in accounting for the gender gap in earnings? One way to answer this question is to compare the impact of taste for competition on the gender coefficient to the impact of other control variables on the same coefficient. This can be done by looking at column III, which includes all the variables in Table 1 except for the choice of tournament. Including these control variables noticeability reduces the gender gap by 20.7% (the gender coefficient changes from–0.122 to –0.097). This result puts the effect of taste for competition in perspective. Namely, the single experimental measure of taste for competition explains around half as much of the gender gap in earnings as a rich set of variables that include demographic characteristics, academic performance, and experimental and survey measures of important psychological attributes."

Finally, they have a great section to address to what extent competitiveness is really distinct from risk aversion: They write the following:

"Taste for competition and the choice of tournament

A clever feature of the experimental design of Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) is that participants make two choices between tournament and piece-rate. In one case, participants perform under the chosen payment scheme while in the other case the payment scheme is simply applied to their past performance (see section 3.1). We will refer to the choice of the tournament in the latter case as “uncompetitive tournament choice.” Because it does not include performing in a competitive environment, Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) argue that the choice between piece-rate and uncompetitive tournament is unaffected by the participants’ attitudes towards competition. If this is the case and the association between earnings and choosing the tournament is driven by taste for competition, then we should observe a weaker relation between earnings and uncompetitive tournament.

To evaluate whether choosing uncompetitive tournament is associated with earnings, we run regressions like the ones reported in columns II and IV of Table 3. In some regressions, we simply substitute tournament with uncompetitive tournament. We find that the coefficients for uncompetitive tournament are positive, but they are not statistically significant and they are half as large as the comparable coefficient in Table 3. In addition, the change in the gender coefficient due to the inclusion of uncompetitive tournament is much smaller and is not statistically significant. In other regressions, we include both tournament and uncompetitive tournament. We find that the coefficient for tournament is both economically and statistically significant whereas the coefficient for uncompetitive tournament is close to zero and far from statistical significance. These results provide compelling evidence that the association between tournament and earnings is indeed driven by the participants’ attitudes towards competition and is not related to the choice of a tournament per se."

Gender Differences in Competitiveness and Career Choices

In the Fall I gave a lecture on "Gender Differences in Competitiveness" at the Decision Making and Emotion Regulation in Life-Span Transitions Conference organized by The Behavior Change Research Network in Berkeley.

Below you find a video of my talk, my lecture covers the first 55 or so minutes. 

The talk is mostly based on
Niederle, Muriel, and Lise Vesterlund, “Do Women Shy away from Competition? Do Men Compete too Much?,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 2007, Vol. 122, No. 3: 1067-1101.

and 

 Buser, Thomas, Muriel Niederle and Hessel Oosterbeek, “Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices,” November, 2012,online appendix.

I also mention

Gneezy, Uri, Muriel Niederle, Aldo Rustichini, “Performance in Competitive Environments: Gender Differences”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, CXVIII, August 2003, 1049 – 1074.

Niederle, Muriel and Lise Vesterlund, “Gender and Competition”, Annual Review in Economics, 2011, 3, 601–30.

Lean In and Gender Differences

The Nytimes wrote in A Titan’s How-To on Breaking the Glass Ceiling about Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

"Ms. Sandberg wants to take women through a collective self-awareness exercise. In her book, she urges them to absorb the social science showing they are judged more harshly and paid less than men; resist slowing down in mere anticipation of having children; insist that their husbands split housework equally; draft short- and long-term career plans; and join a “Lean In Circle,” which is half business school and half book club."

"Ms. Sandberg’s chief critic has been Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former top State Department official, who published an Atlantic Magazine article titled “Why Women Can’t Have It All,” last year arguing that feminism — and Ms. Sandberg — were holding women to unattainable standards for personal and professional success."

I at least often use the work on the gender differences I found in competitiveness (see here, here and for an overview here), self-confidence, choosing challenges as telling my female students that it looks like there is this gender difference, we should just be aware of it, to make sure we make  choices we are happy with. Furthermore, given that competitiveness seems to be important even for career choices (see here), thinking about whether alternative ways to structure those choices could reduce the importance of competitiveness is a worthwhile task.

Conference in Bonn

I'll be at the IZA conference in Bonn in the next 2 days. Here's the program:

Monday, June 17:

08:45 - 09:00 Registration


09:00 - 09:15 Welcome Address
Ulf Rinne (IZA Deputy Director of Research)
Marius Malinowski (HypoVereinsbank)
Michael Vlassopoulos (University of Southampton) and Steffen Altmann (IZA)


09:15 - 09:30 UniCredit & Universities Best Paper Award (*)
Reinhard H. Schmidt (Goethe University Frankfurt and Scientific Committee of the UniCredit & Universities Foundation)

09:30 - 10:15 Pedro Robalo (University of Amsterdam), Rei Sayag (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
  "Paying is Believing: The Effect of Costly Information on Bayesian Updating (*)"


10:15 - 11:00 Marie Claire Villeval (CNRS, GATE and IZA), Julie Beugnot (Université Laval), Bernard Fortin (Université Laval), Guy Lacroix (Université Laval)
  "Social Networks, Peer Pressure and Labor Supply"


11:00 - 11:30 Coffee Break


11:30 - 12:15 Robert Dur (Erasmus University Rotterdam and IZA), Josse Delfgaauw (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Arjan Non (Maastricht University), Willem Verbeke (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
  "The Effects of Prize Spread and Noise in Elimination Tournaments: A Natural Field Experiment"

12:15 - 13:00 Jordi Brandts (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Andrej Angelovski (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona), Carles Solà (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)
  "Hiring and Escalation Bias in Performance Evaluations: A Laboratory Experiment"


13:00 - 14:30 Lunch


14:30 - 15:15 Anat Bracha (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston), Uri Gneezy (University of California, San Diego)
  "Relative Pay and Labor Supply"

15:15 - 16:00 Nicola Lacetera (University of Toronto), Bradley Larsen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Devin Pope (University of Chicago), Justin Sydnor (University of Wisconsin)
  "Bid Takers or Market Makers? The Effect of Auctioneers on Auction Outcomes"


16:00 - 16:30 Coffee Break


16:30 - 17:15 Sebastian Goerg (Florida State University), Sebastian Kube (University of Bonn and IZA)
  "Goals (th)at Work? Goals, Monetary Incentives, and Workers’ Performance"

17:15 - 18:00 Oriana Bandiera (London School of Economics and IZA), Nava Ashraf (Harvard Business School), Scott Lee (Harvard Business School)
  "Mission Incentives: Experimental Evidence on Selection, Performance and Retention among Health Workers in Zambia "


19:00 Dinner at Restaurant "Bahnhöfchen", Rheinaustr. 116, Bonn

Tuesday, June 18:

09:30 - 10:15 Matthias Sutter (University of Innsbruck and IZA), Loukas Balafoutas (University of Innsbruck), Rudolf Kerschbamer (University of Innsbruck)
  "Moral Hazard in a Real-World Credence Goods Market"

10:15 - 11:00 Florian Englmaier (University of Würzburg), Johannes Buckenmaier (University of Cologne), Matthias Fahn (University of Würzburg)
  "Relational Contracts with Present-Biased Preferences"


11:00 - 11:30 Coffee Break


11:30 - 12:15 Michael Kosfeld (Goethe University Frankfurt and IZA)
  "Sorting of Motivated Agents: Evidence from Applicants to the German Police"

12:15 - 13:00 Mitchell Hoffman (Yale School of Management), Stephen Burks (University of Minnesota, Morris and IZA), Bo Cowgill (University of California, Berkeley), Michael Housman (Evolv on Demand)
  "The Value of Hiring Through Referrals"


13:00 - 14:30 Lunch


14:30 - 15:15 Judd Kessler (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), Lucas Coffman (Ohio State University), Clayton Featherston (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)
  "Can a Small Nudge Affect Job Choice? Evidence from Teach for America"

15:15 - 16:00 Florian Hett (University of Mainz), Yann Girard (Goethe University Frankfurt)
  "Competitiveness in Dynamic Group Contests: Evidence from Combined Field and Lab Data (*)"


16:00 - 16:30 Coffee Break


16:30 - 17:15 Muriel Niederle (Stanford University), Thomas Buser (University of Amsterdam), Hessel Oosterbeek (University of Amsterdam)
  "Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices"


19:00 Dinner at Restaurant "Strandhaus", Georgstr. 28, Bonn

Michigan

I'm giving a talk at the Social, Behavioral, and Experimental Economics (SBEE), Winter 2014 Seminar Series. Come by if you're in Michigan, it's from 3:30-5

I'll talk about Gender Differences in Competitiveness, and especially my most recent work therein

Buser, Thomas, Muriel Niederle and Hessel Oosterbeek, “Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices,”

Class Composition and Career Choice

Massimo Anelli and Giovanni Peri have a paper on "The Long Run Effects of High-School Class Gender Composition"

The abstract reads:
"The long run earnings and career potential of individuals are strongly affected by their education. Among college educated individuals, the choice of college major is a very important determinant of labor market outcomes. In most countries men and women exhibit significant differences in this choice which is responsible for a large portion of the gender gap in earnings. In this paper we analyze whether the gender composition of peers (classmates) in high school affects the choice of major and hence long run earning potential. We use a newly collected and unique dataset covering 30,000 Italian students graduated from high school between 1985 and 2005. We exploit the fact that students are assigned to classes whose gender composition, within a school over time, varies exogenously. Moreover we are able to control for family, cohort, teacher and school effects in assessing the effect of peer-gender ratio on outcomes. We find that the gender ratio of peers in high school significantly affected the choice of major. A larger share of same-sex peers increases the probability of choosing majors associated to high earning jobs (Economics/Business, Medicine, Engineering). For women we also find that a large percentage of female high school classmates increases their long run performance in college and their earnings."

They say that "There are three reasons why we choose Italian high school students as ideal subjects to study the e ffect of peer gender on the choice of college major. First, in Italian high schools students are assigned to a class (usually made of 20 to 30 peers) when they enroll in high school and, except for small rates of attrition, they share with them the same teachers and in a pre-determined academic curriculum for 5 years (from 13 to 18 years old). These peers, therefore, interact with each other intensely during fi ve years of their school life, a period in which their personal and gender identity are fundamentally shaped."

And
"the class gender ratio was uncorrelated to any of the predetermined and observable characteristics of the students and of the class. This is the ideal context to separate school, cohort and teacher eff ects from e ffects of the class gender-ratio [..]. we now own data on 30,000 college preparatory high school students in the city of Milan (Italy) who graduated between 1985 and 2005. Those data include information on their school, cohort, class, identity of their peers, year of graduation, residence address when in high school, exit-test scores. Moreover we have merged this information with that on their college career (choice of major, graduation date, university attended) on labor market outcomes (earnings in year 2005, occupational choice) and on their family background."

Their main findings are

"First, we fi nd that, controlling for academic quality and family background, being assigned to a high school class with a larger share of people of the same gender increases the probability of choosing high earning college majors. This fi nding is true for both men and women. In particular women in high school classes with very high percentage of women have a 5-6% higher probability to choose high-earning majors than women in classes with high percentage of men. Similarly men in classes with high percentages of men have a 6-7% higher probability of choosing high earning majors. Second, those women who attended classes with large percentage of women and then choose high earning majors performed better than or as well as other women in those majors in terms of dropout rates and time to graduation. Hence the long run eff ect of attending high school classes with high percentage of women is, for a woman, a higher probability of enrolling and graduating from high earning majors and therefore higher expected wage. On the other hand men who attended high school classes with high percentage of men had higher probability of enrolling in high-earning majors but the final probability of graduating from high earning major was not diff erent from that of other men due to higher attrition. Finally, women who attended high school classes with high percentage of women and then enrolled in high earning majors had higher wages on the labor market relative to other women above and beyond (i.e. even controlling for) the e ffect driven by the major."

How do they rationalize their findings:

"These fi ndings can be rationalized with a simple human capital model in which the choice of major is  a ffected by its costs and benefi ts. If the individual cost of attending a high earning major depends on abilities (negatively) and on the self-confi dence of a person (positively), the low enrollment of women in those majors may be due to a low degree of self-confi dence. The share of women in the same high school class may increase the self-con fidence of a woman, as also found in the experimental evidence presented in the behavioral economic literature (Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini 2003, Niederle and Vesterlund 2007) and as hypothesized in the theoretical literature on gender identity introduced by Akerlof and Kranton (2000)."

For a paper on belief updating and gender differences in doing so, see also

Mobius, Markus M., Muriel Niederle, Paul Niehaus and Tanya Rosenblat, “Managing Self-Confidence: Theory and Experimental Evidence”, September 2012.

See my earlier post on gender differences and competitiveness for looking at psychological attributes that can account for gender differences in choices of areas of study. We find that competitiveness is correlated with such study choices. We do not find that overconfidence per se is correlated with choices, though feelings on absolute or relative mathematical ability are indeed very much correlated with study choices.

Gender and careers

Beryl Benderly at Science, Careers, writes about "The Complexity of Gender Differences in Choosing STEM"
My paper with Thomas Buser and Hessel Oosterbeek “Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices,” receives a very nice summary (see also my former blogposts on it here and here)

I whole heartedly agree with the first and last sentence of Beryl: 
"The question of why academically able girls are less likely than boys—even less accomplished boys—to enroll in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs, especially in physical sciences, technology, and some engineering disciplines, has long bedeviled researchers and educators."
And
"Clearly, this is a complex problem that cannot be explained by any single factor or rubric."

Gender Differences in Career Choices: The Importance of Competitiveness

Today, presenting at UCSD, I blogged about the paper here.

Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development.

My Stanford colleague has a series of interesting work on the effect of different beliefs about intelligence: Do we think it is innate, or can it be changed by hard work? Her main hypothesis is that people who believe that intelligence is innate dread failure because failure is a (negative) signal about one's abilities. On the other hand, people that believe that intelligence can be changed by work do not fear failure as much, they can use failure as an opportunity to learn and grow. The mindset on intelligence will therefore have an impact on whether we seek challenges, and how much stress we feel when exposed to complicated new tasks.

Here's a feature about her work in NY Magazine and a BBC article

A good summary of her work is her book: Dweck, C. S. (1999). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development. Philadelphia, PA: Taylor and Francis/Psychology

Press.

Here is a recent paper of hers,  "Can Everyone Become Highly Intelligent? Cultural Differences in and Societal Consequences of Beliefs About the Universal Potential for Intelligence" by Rattan Aneeta; Savani, Krishna; Naidu N.V.R and Dweck, Carol S. in the November 2012 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

I would be very interested in an experiment showing the correlation between those beliefs and classroom behavior over the long run, controlling for initial grades etc. Something in the style of what me and my coauthors did in "Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices" (see my former post)

Talking about Gender in Vienna

On Thursday I'll give a somewhat overview talk on "Gender Differences in Competitiveness: Laboratory findings and their external relevance," at 17 hours in Vienna at the WU Wien.

Women are not men

In "Women are not men", a freakonomics podcast, you can hear lots about gender differences, including the ever growing slice that is devoted to studying gender differences in competitiveness (what a great topic:)
(see e.g. here, here and here).
You can listen to Uri Gneezy, my coauthor on the first gender and competition study, talking about it somewhere in the middle of the podcast... He also emphasizes his paper with Kenneth Leonard and John List: Gneezy, U, Leonard, K.L. and List, J.A. (2009) “Gender Differences in Competition: Evidence from a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society,” Econometrica, 77, 5, 1637-1664.

In the podcast you also find work on gender differences in online presence, Happiness and Crime...

Conference in Caltech

Caltech Mini-conference on Experimental Economics

November 7-8, 2014, Baxter Hall, Caltech
Organized by Marina Agranov and Leeat Yariv

Friday, November 7, 2014

9:00AM – 9:30AM
Check-in and Breakfast
9:30AM – 10:10AM
Cooperation in the Finitely Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma
Presnted by: Guillaume Frechette (New York University)
Co-authors: Matthew Embrey and Sevgi Yuksel
10:10AM – 10:50AM
Dynamic Coalitions and Communication
Presented by: Salvatore Nunnari (Columbia University)
Co-authors: Dave Baron and Renee Bowen
10:50AM – 11:10AM
Coffee Break
11:10AM – 11:50PM
Money is not memory: an experiment
Presented by: G
abrielle Camera (Chapman University)
Co-authors: Maria Bigoni and Marco Casari
11:50AM – 12:30PM
Identity and the Escalation of Conflict
Presented by: Michael McBride (University of California – Irvine)
Co-authors: Michael Caldara, Matthew McCarter, and Roman Sherementa
12:30PM – 1:30PM
Lunch
1:30PM – 2:10PM
Dynamic Incentives and Markov Perfection: Putting the "Conditional" in
Cooperation
Presented by: Alistair Wilson (University of Pittsburgh)
Co-author: Emanuel Vespa
2:10PM – 2:30PM
Coffee Break
2:30PM – 3:10PM
Testing the Theory of Continuous Time Games
Presented by: Ryan Oprea (University of California – Santa Barbara)
Co-author: Evan Calford
3:10PM – 3:30PM
Coffee Break
3:30PM – 4:10PM
The Distributional Preferences of the Elite
Presented by: Shachar Kariv (University of California – Berkeley)
Co-author: Raymond Fisman, Pamela Jakiela, Daniel Markovits
4:10PM – 4:30PM
Coffee Break
4:30PM – 5:10PM
Measuring Ambiguity Aversion: Experimental Tests of Subjective Expected
Utility
Presented by: Charles Sprenger (University of California – San Diego)
Co-author: James Andreoni and Tobias Schmidt
6PM
Dinner and Magic

Saturday, November 8, 2014
9:00AM – 9:30AM
Breakfast
9:30AM – 10:10AM
Voting with Endogenous Information Acquisition: Theory and Evidence
Presented by: John Duffy (University of California – Irvine)
Co-author: Sourav Bhattacharya and Sun-Tak Kim
10:10AM – 10:50AM
Endogenous sample selection in common value environments: A
laboratory study
Presented by: Ignacio Esponda (Washington University)
Co-author: Emanuel Vespa
10:50AM – 11:20AM
Coffee Break
11:20AM – 12:10AM
Negative Childhood Experiences and Risk Aversion: Evidence from
Children Exposed to Domestic Violence
Presented by: Marco Castillo (George Mason University)
12:10AM – 12:50PM
Gender Differences in Competitiveness and Career Choices
Presented by: Muriel Niederle (Stanford University)
Co-authors: Thomas Buser and Hessel Oosterbeek
12:50PM
Lunch and Farewells

ASSA: Gender sessions on Jan 04

Today I present at the ASSA session, looks like a great session!

Jan 04, 2016 8:00 am, Hilton Union Square, Continental Ballroom 4
American Economic Association
Gender at Work: Evidence from Experimental Economics (C9, J7)

Presiding: CATHERINE ECKEL (Texas A&M University)

Knowing When to Ask: The Cost of Leaning In
CHRISTINE EXLEY (Stanford University)
MURIEL NIEDERLE (Stanford University)
LISE VESTERLUND (University of Pittsburgh)

A University-Wide Field Experiment on Gender Differences in Job Entry Decisions
ANYA SAMEK (University of Southern California)

Born to Lead? Gender Differences in Incentive Provision and Its Evaluation
ALEXANDRA VAN GEEN (Erasmus University)
OLGA SHURCHKOV (Wellesley College)

Gender Differences in Negotiation by Communication Method
ADAM GREENBERG (University of California-San Diego)
RAGAN PETRIE (George Mason University)

Stress and the gender difference in willingness to compete
THOMAS BUSER (University of Amsterdam)
ANNA DREBER ALMENBERG (Stockholm School of Economics)
JOHANNA MOLLERSTROM (George Mason University)

Discussants:
CHRISTINE EXLEY (Stanford University)
ANAT BRACHA (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston)
KATHERINE COFFMAN (Ohio State University)
ALEXANDRA VAN GEEN (Erasmus University)


Then there is

Jan 04, 2016 10:15 am, Marriott Marquis, Walnut
Association for the Study of Generosity in Economics/International Association for Feminist Economics
Gender and Altruistic Decisions (D6, J1)
Presiding: CATHERINE ECKEL (Texas A&M University)

Making Decisions for Others: The Consequences of Gender Stereotypes
CATHERINE ECKEL (Texas A&M University)

Finding Excuses to Decline the Ask: A Field Experiment
RAGAN PETRIE (George Mason University)
CHRISTINE EXLEY (Harvard University)

The Importance of Fuzzy Beliefs
KATHERINE COFFMAN (Ohio State University)
MURIEL NIEDERLE (Stanford University)

Mitigating Gender Gaps in Competitiveness and the Response to Performance Feedback: Evidence from Randomized Educational Interventions
SULE ALAN (University of Essex)
SEDA ERTAC (Koc University)

Discussants:
JONATHAN MEER (Texas A&M University)


Jan 04, 2016 10:15 am, Hilton Union Square, Continental – Parlor 3 
American Economic Association
Education and Gender (I2, J1)
Presiding: SHULAMIT KAHN (Boston University)

The STEM Gender Gap: Evidence from the CA State Science Fair
NANNEH CHEHRAS (University of California-Irvine)

Educational Mobility across Three Generations of American Women
SARAH KROEGER (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
OWEN THOMPSON (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

Student Appearance and Class Performance
CHRISTINA PETERS (Metropolitan State University of Denver)
REY HERNANDEZ-JULIAN (Metropolitan State University of Denver)

The Math Gender Gap: The Role of Culture
NÚRIA RODRÍGUEZ-PLANAS (City University of New York-Queens College)
NATALIA NOLLENBERGER (IAE-CSIC)
ALMUDENA SEVILLA (Queen Mary University of London)

Discussants:
SHULAMIT KAHN (Boston University)
GARY SOLON (University of Arizona)
TANYA ROSENBLAT (University of Michigan)
MARGARET E. BLUME-KOHOUT (New Mexico Consortium and Mount Holyoke College)


Jan 04, 2016 10:15 am, Marriott Marquis, Sierra K 
Union for Radical Political Economics/International Association for Feminist Economics
Gender and Educational Investment (I2)
Presiding: LINDA LUCAS (University of South Florida)

Empowered or Not? Exploring the Conundrum of Increasing Female Schooling and Stagnant Female Labor Market Participation in Japan, China and India
SUCHARITA SINHA MUKERJEE (College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University)

Family Wealth Shock: The Allocation of Property Rights within Marriage and Children’s Education Investment
JING LIU (Central University of Finance and Economics)
LIANGSHU QI (Tsinghua University)

An Early Assessment of Extension of Compulsory School Attendance in Turkey: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
BILGE ERTEN (Northeastern University)

The Pre-School Effects: Analyzing the Causal Effects of Pre-School Attendance on Income, Educational Attainment, and Mother's Labor Force Participation
ALYSSA SCHNEEBAUM (Vienna University of Economics and Business)

Discussants:
LINDA LUCAS (University of South Florida)
LEANNE RONCOLATO (Franklin and Marshall College)

Jan 04, 2016 12:30 pm, Marriott Marquis, Sierra B 
International Association for Feminist Economics
Gendered Responses to Upheaval and Recession (F6)
Presiding: JOYCE JACOBSEN (Wesleyan University)

What are the Implications of Austerity Policy Chosen by the Government of Canada in the Midst of the Great Depression 2008-2009 for Women Workers in the Medium to Long-Run? Gender Analysis of the Socio-Economic Status of Canadian Women Workers and Policy Prescriptions for Select Case Studies
ANA ANDROSIK (New School )

Gender, Class and the Crisis
MARCELLA CORSI (Sapienza University of Rome)
CARLO D’IPPOLITI (Sapienza University of Rome)

The Impact of the Financial Crisis on Gender Inequalities: Evidence from Europe
ESTHER JEFFERS (University of Paris 8)
CAROLE BRUNET (University of Paris 8)

Gender, Socieconomic Status, Time-Use, and the Great Recession in the U.S.
EBRU KONGAR (Dickinson College)
MARK PRICE (Keystone Research Center)

Discussants:
JOYCE JACOBSEN (Wesleyan University)
YANA VAN DER MUELEN RODGERS (Rutgers University)

Jan 04, 2016 2:30 pm, Hilton Union Square, Franciscan C 
American Economic Association
Experimental Gender Economics (C9, D8)
Presiding: MURIEL NIEDERLE (Stanford University)

Affirmative Action and Stereotype Threat
ANAT BRACHA (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston)
ALMA COHEN (Harvard University)
LYNN CONELL-PRICE (Carnegie Mellon University)

Risk in the Background: How Men and Women Respond
ALEXANDRA VAN GEEN (Erasmus University)

After You: Gender and Group Decision-Making
PEDRO BORDALO (Royal Holloway)
KATHERINE COFFMAN (Ohio State University)
NICOLA GENNAIOLI (Bocconi University)
ANDREI SHLEIFER (Harvard University)

Bursting the Bubble: Gender Differences in Financial Bubbles with Anonymous Traders
CATHERINE ECKEL (Texas A&M University)
SASCHA FÜLLBRUNN (Radboud University)

Discussants:
JOHANNA MOLLERSTROM (George Mason University)
RAGAN PETRIE (George Mason University)
ANYA SAMEK (University of Southern Califiornia)
OLGA SHURCHKOV (Wellesley College)

Gender and the Society for Neuroscience Conference

On Sunday, I'll give a talk at the Society For Neuroscience Conference in San Diego, in a special session on Gender Bias: Facing the Facts for the Future of Neuroscience.

Sunday, Nov 10, 2013, 8:30 AM -11:00 AM

To address the daunting challenges in neuroscience, we must effectively utilize the best scientific talent. Recent studies suggest that gender bias is limiting our ability to do this. In this symposium, leading social scientists will present data on the prevalence of gender bias, its influence on our decisions, and its effects on the career paths of women. Interventions to reduce gender bias in the scientific workplace will be discussed.
Chair:
Jennifer Raymond

106.01. Introduction
  106.02. Can institution-wide interventions ameliorate unconscious bias: Evidence beyond observational studies
H. Valantine;
Sr Assoc Dean, Diversity and Leadership, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA.
  106.03. Redefining merit to justify discrimination
E. Uhlmann;
Management and Human Resources Dept, HEC Paris - School of Management, Jouy-en-Josas, FRANCE.
  106.04. But I thought I was being nice: How benevolent sexism undermines women's advancement
P. Glick;
Dept Psychology, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI.
  106.05. Gender, competitiveness, and career choices
M. Niederle;
Dept Economics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
  106.06. Closing Remarks

Gender Wage gap

There is a new NBER working paper:
THE GENDER WAGE GAP:EXTENT, TRENDS, AND EXPLANATIONS 
by Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn

The abstract reads:
"Using PSID microdata over the 1980-2010, we provide new empirical evidence on the extent of and trends in the gender wage gap, which declined considerably over this period. By 2010, conventional human capital variables taken together explained little of the gender wage gap, while gender differences in occupation and industry continued to be important. Moreover, the gender pay gap declined much more slowly at the top of the wage distribution that at the middle or the bottom and by 2010 was noticeably higher at the top. We then survey the literature to identify what has been learned about the explanations for the gap. We conclude that many of the traditional explanations continue to have salience. Although human capital factors are now relatively unimportant in the aggregate, women’s work force interruptions and shorter hours remain significant in high skilled occupations, possibly due to compensating differentials. Gender differences in occupations and industries, as well as differences in gender roles and the gender division of labor remain important, and research based on experimental evidence strongly suggests that discrimination cannot be discounted. Psychological attributes or noncognitive skills comprise one of the newer explanations for gender differences in outcomes. Our effort to assess the quantitative evidence on the importance of these factors suggests that they account for a small to moderate portion of the gender pay gap, considerably smaller than say occupation and industry effects, though they appear to modestly contribute to these differences."

One conclusion in terms of future work is to understand better what psychological factors matter, and how much they do matter. While there has been some work on that line, it is really very far from giving a great answer, I believe.

I count my own work in that vein, as a step in the right direction: showing the importance of psychological factors, though hard to assess their impact on the gender wage gap, see Thomas Buser and Hessel Oosterbeek “Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices,” receives a very nice summary (see also my former blogposts on it here and here)