Do women respond less to performance pay? Building evidence from multiple experiments

Oriana Bandiera, Gregory Fischer, Andrea Prat and Erina Ytsma

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Performance pay increases productivity but also earnings inequality. Can it contribute to the gender gap because women are less responsive? We provide answers by aggregating evidence from existing experiments on performance incentives with male and female subjects, regardless of whether they test for gender differences. Using a Bayesian hierarchical model we estimate both the average effect and heterogeneity across studies. We find that the gender response difference is close to zero and heterogeneity across studies is small, while performance pay increases output by 0.36 standard deviations on average. The data thus support agency theory for men and women alike.

Keywords: wage differentials; gender; econometrics; meta-analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2021-12-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in American Economic Review: Insights, 1, December, 2021, 3(4), pp. 435-54. ISSN: 2640-205X

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/111841/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do Women Respond Less to Performance Pay? Building Evidence from Multiple Experiments (2021)
Working Paper: Do women respond less to performance pay? Building evidence from multiple experiments (2016)
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:ehl:lserod:111841

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().