Working Paper: NBER ID: w18576
Authors: Thomas Buser; Muriel Niederle; Hessel Oosterbeek
Abstract: 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.
Keywords: Field experiments; Laboratory experiments; Economics of education; Competitiveness
JEL Codes: C9; I20; J16; J24
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Competitiveness (L11) | Gender Gap in Profile Choices (J16) |
| Competitiveness (L11) | Prestige of Study Profiles (A14) |
| Gender Differences in Competitiveness (J16) | Gender Gap in Educational Choices (I24) |
| Competitiveness (L11) | Educational Outcomes (I21) |
| Competitiveness (L11) | Profile Choices (D79) |