Muriel Niederle

The Role of Beliefs in Driving Gender Discrimination

Management Science · 2021-02-04 · 137 citations

Although there is ample evidence of discrimination against women in the workplace, it can be difficult to understand what factors contribute to discriminatory behavior. We use an experiment to both document discrimination and unpack its sources. First, we show that, on average, employers prefer to hire male over female workers for male-typed tasks, even when the two workers have identical résumés. Second, and most critically, we use a control condition to identify that this discrimination is not…

Failures in Contingent Reasoning: The Role of Uncertainty

American Economic Review · 2019-09-30 · 104 citations

We propose a new channel to account for the difficulties of individuals with contingent reasoning: the presence of uncertainty. When moving from an environment with one state of known value to one with multiple possible values, two changes occur. First, the number of values to consider increases. Second, the value of the state is uncertain. We show in an experiment that this lack of certainty, or the loss of the Power of Certainty, impedes payoff maximization and that it accounts for a substanti…

Gender and the Dynamics of Economics Seminars

National Bureau of Economic Research · 2021-02-01 · 103 citations

This paper reports the results of the first systematic attempt at quantitatively measuring the seminar culture within economics and testing whether it is gender neutral. We collected data on every interaction between presenters and their audience in hundreds of research seminars and job market talks across most leading economics departments, as well as during summer conferences. We find that women presenters are treated differently than their male counterparts. Women are asked more questions dur…

Can Competitiveness predict Education and Labor Market Outcomes? Evidence from Incentivized Choice and Survey Measures

National Bureau of Economic Research · 2021-06-01 · 56 citations

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 on an 11-point scale. Both measures are strong and consistent predictors of income, occupation, completed level of education and field of study. The predictive p…

Can Competitiveness Predict Education and Labor Market Outcomes? Evidence from Incentivized Choice and Survey Measures

The Review of Economics and Statistics · 2024-03-18 · 24 citations

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 measu…