An important line of research using laboratory experiments has provided a new potential reason for gender imbalances in labor markets: men are more competitively inclined than women. Whether, and to what extent, gender differences in attitudes toward competition lead to differences in naturally-occurring labor markets remains an open question. To examine this, we run a natural field experiment on job-entry decisions where we randomize almost 9,000 job-seekers into different compensation regimes. By varying the role that individual competition plays in setting the wage and the gender composition, we examine whether a competitive compensation regime, by itself, can cause differential job entry. The data highlight the power of the compensation regime in that women disproportionately shy away from competitive work settings. Yet, there are important factors that attenuate the gender differences, including whether the job is performed in teams, whether the position has overt gender associations, and the age of the job-seekers. We also find that the effect is most pronounced in labor markets with attractive alternative employment options. Furthermore, our results suggest that preferences over uncertainty can be just as important as preferences over competition per se in driving job-entry choices.

This paper examines the role of cooperativeness and impatience in the exploitation of common pool resources (CPRs) by combining laboratory experiments with field data. We study fishermen whose main, and often only, source of income stems from the use of fishing grounds with open access. The exploitation of a CPR involves a negative interpersonal and inter-temporal externality because individuals who exploit the CPR reduce the current and the future yield both for others and for themselves. Economic theory -which assumes the existence of general across-situational traits -thus predicts that fishermen who exhibit more cooperative and less impatient behavior in the laboratory should be less likely to exploit the CPR, which our findings confirm. We thus corroborate the economic theory and extend the scope of other-regarding preference theories to crucial economic decisions with lasting consequences for the people involved. In addition, we establish cooperativeness and impatience as two distinct traits related to resource conservation in the field and validate laboratory preference measures.