摘要：A number of papers have recently argued that men and women have different
attitudes and behavioural responses to competition. Laboratory experiments
suggest that these gender differences are very large but it is important to be
able to map these findings into real world differences. In this paper, we use
performance pay as an indicator of competition in the workplace and compare the
gender gap in incidence of performance pay and earnings and work effort under
these contracts. Women are less likely to found in performance pay contracts but
the gender gap is small. Furthermore, the effect of performance pay on earnings
is modest and does not differ markedly by gender. Consequently the ability of
these theories to explain the gender pay gap seems very limited.
