Publication by fellows Thomas Buser and Hessel Oosterbeek in Quarterly Journal of Economics
The article ‘Gender, Competitivenes, and Career Choices’ by fellows Thomas Buser and Hessel Oosterbeek (with Muriel Niederle) was published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics (October 2014).
Buser, Niederle and Oosterbeek Gender study differences in competitiveness that have been hypothesized as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes. They examine the predictive power of a standard laboratory experimental measure of competitiveness for the later important choice of academic track of secondary school students in the Netherlands. The authors show that boys are substantially more competitive than girls and they find that competitiveness is strongly positively correlated with choosing more prestigious academic tracks even conditional on academic ability. Most important, Buser, Niederle and Oosterbeek find that the gender difference in competitiveness accounts for a substantial portion (about 20%) of the gender difference in track choice. (from the abstract). Please click here to read the full article.
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