Women's Labor Supply - Competitive Preferences and Informal Caregiving

Chapter 1: We study gender differences in competitive behavior, running an experiment with Danish schoolchildren. We control for individual performance, risk preferences, confidence, stereotypes, and interactions with the opposite gender and we find Danish girls are 8.4 % less likely to choose a competitive scheme. More-over, we elicit the network of friends within each class and we find that girls are 9.9 % more likely to enter a tournament if one more of her friends competes. Finally, the gender gap increases to 12.7 % when we focus our analysis on children performing above the average. When we compute the payoff maximizing decision, we discover that with age, girls avoid the competition when they should choose it. Chapter 2: Using SHARE data, I examine the effect of retirement on daily caregiving to parents and parents-in-law. I focus on individuals aged 50-70 in 18 European countries. I account for the possible simultaneity bias of the retirement decision and the choice to provide informal care, by instrumenting the retirement status with having reached country-specific pension eligibility ages for early and statutory retirement. I find a significant and positive causal effect of retirement on daily caregiving. Moreover, I find evidence of heterogeneous effects across European regions.