This paper examines how female and male examination performance are differentially affected by the degree of competitive pressure faced. Our setting is China's National College Entrance Exam (Gaokao) which is widely regarded as the world's most competitive exam. We show that compared to male...

This paper investigates the effect of work interruption on workers' subsequent productivity. We employ a data set of individual productivity and machine conditions, in which each worker faces the chance, on a daily basis, that her machine will break down randomly. Our analysis finds that...

Using a laboratory experiment we examine how social comparisons affect behavior in a sequential search task. In a control treatment, subjects search in isolation while in two other treatments subjects get feedback on the search decisions and outcomes of a partner subject. The average level and...

We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment with 567 children, aged four to eleven, in which we investigate the effect of social norms on lying and test whether norm sensitivity changes with age. Children think about a number between 1 and 6 in private, then roll a die, and report whether the...

Building on the much-celebrated sex-specific hypothesis on visceral responses, here we examine whether the well-replicated gender difference in competitiveness may be influenced by the visceral responses. In the first experiment, we show that the gender difference in competitiveness is partially...