EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Material incentives moderate gender differences in cognitive effort among children

Paula Apascaritei, Jonas Radl and Madeline Swarr

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2024, vol. 114, 1-20

Abstract: Effort is crucial for academic performance and varies by gender. However, it is not clear at what age nor under what circumstances gender differences in effort arise. Using behavioral measures of executive function from 799 fifth-grade students, we find no gender differences in cognitive effort in the absence of rewards. However, boys exert more effort than girls when materially incentivized. Adding a status incentive on top of material rewards does not further increase the gender gap. According to expectancy-value theory, the degree to which incentives moderate the gender effect may depend on ability. We find that while low-ability girls work as hard as high-ability girls when no incentives are present, low-ability boys tend to disengage from effortful tasks. High-ability girls increase effort more than low-ability girls when material incentives are added, and high-ability boys increase effort more than low-ability boys when status incentives are added.

Keywords: Cognitive effort; Gender; Incentives; Children; Laboratory experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/312438/1/F ... erial-incentives.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:312438

DOI: 10.1016/j.lindif.2024.102494

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-29
Handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:312438