Suchergebnisse

ObjectivesWomen are underrepresented in top positions and experimental evidence suggests that one explanation is gender differences in preferences for competition, that is, fewer women than men enter competition‐intensive careers. Less is known about whether there are remaining gender differences in competitiveness within the subpopulation of men and women that choose to pursue such careers, which creates further female underrepresentation in top positions. Studying a subcomponent of competitiveness, namely resilience to failures, this article provides quasi experimental evidence from the field on this issue.MethodsI study professional golfers' resilience to failures by estimating the causal effect of a failure in one tournament on the performance in the next.ResultsThe results show that both male and female golfers respond negatively to failures, and that their responses are virtually identical.ConclusionThus, in this particular subpopulation of competitive men and women there seems to be no gender difference in resilience to failures.

Essay 1 (with Oskar Nordström Skans): This paper provides field evidence on the causal impact of past successes on future performances. Since persistence in success or failure is likely to be linked through, potentially time-varying, ability it is intrinsically difficult to identify the causal effect of succeeding on the probability of performing well in the future. We therefore employ a regression discontinuity design on data from professional golf tournaments exploiting that almost equally skilled players are separated into successes and failures half-way into the tournaments (the "cut"). We show that players who (marginally) succeeded in making the cut substantially increased their performance in subsequent tournaments relative to players who (marginally) failed to make the cut. This success-effect is substantially larger when the subsequent (outcome) tournament involves more prize money. The results therefore suggest that past successes provide an important prerequisite when performing high-stakes tasks. Essay 2: Recent experimental evidence suggests that women in general are more discouraged than men by failures which potentially can explain why women, on average, are less likely than men to reach top-positions in firms. This paper provides the first quasi-experimental evidence from the field on this issue using data from all-female and all-male professional golf tournaments to see if this result can be replicated among competitive men and women. These top-performing men and women are active in an environment with multiple rounds of competition and the institutional set-up of the tournaments makes it possible to causally estimate the effect of the result in one tournament on the performance in the next. The results show that both male and female golfers respond negatively to a failure and that their responses are virtually identical. This finding suggests that women's difficulties in reaching top-positions in firms are caused by external rather than internal barriers. Essay 3: Voting is a fundamental human right. Yet, individuals that are younger than 18 do typically not have this right since they are considered uninformed. However, recent evidence tentatively suggests that the political knowledge of youths is endogenous to the voting age. I test for the existence of such dynamic adjustments utilizing voting age discontinuities caused by Swedish laws. I employ a regression discontinuity strategy on Swedish register data to estimate the causal effect of early age voting right on political knowledge around age 18. The results do not support the existence of positive causal effects of early age voting right on political knowledge. Thus, we should not expect that 16-year-olds respond by acquiring more political knowledge if they are given the right to vote. This finding weakens the case for a lowering of the voting age from 18 to 16. Essay 4 (with Lena Hensvik): We postulate that firms' production losses from absence depend on the employees' internal substitutability, incentivizing firms to keep absence low in positions with few substitutes. Using Swedish employer-employee data we show that absence is substantially lower in such positions even conditional on establishment and occupation fixed effects. The result reflects sorting on both entry and exit margins, with stronger separations responses when it was difficult to predict the absence of the employees beforehand. These findings highlight that internal substitution insures firms against production disruptions caused by absence and that absence costs are important aspects of firms' hiring and separations decisions.

Voting is a fundamental human right. Yet, individuals that are younger than 18 do typically not have this right since they are considered uninformed. However, recent evidence tentatively suggests that the political knowledge of youths is endogenous to the voting age. I test for the existence of such dynamic adjustments utilizing voting age discontinuities caused by Swedish laws. I employ a regression discontinuity strategy on Swedish register data to estimate the causal effect of early age voting right on political knowledge around age 18. The results do not support the existence of positive causal effects of early age voting right on political knowledge. Thus, we should not expect that 16-year-olds respond by acquiring more political knowledge if they are given the right to vote. This finding weakens the case for a lowering of the voting age from 18 to 16.

Recent decades have seen a strong trend among democratic countries to extend voting rights at subnational levels to non-naturalized immigrants, creating substantial variation across countries in terms of voting eligibility rules for non-naturalized immigrants. Our knowledge of the consequences of these different systems for immigrant political integration is, however, limited. This article seeks to shed new light on this important issue by using Swedish data to study whether immigrants who face shorter residency requirements for voting eligibility in local elections are more likely to integrate politically. We find little compelling evidence that such is the case. The results suggest that immigrants who became eligible to vote after six to seven years were as likely to naturalize and vote in future elections in both the short and long run as those who received the right to vote after only three years of residency. Thus, although expanded franchise can be of symbolic, as well as practical, value, it is unlikely to be a panacea for immigrant political inclusion. The argument that early voting rights for non-naturalized immigrants is desirable since it helps speed up immigrant political integration should, therefore, be used with some care by those advocating for such reforms.

We study the short- and long-term impact of local enfranchisement of foreign citizens born outside the EU on political integration outcomes. Local voting rights for foreigners were introduced in the Swedish electoral system in 1976. This right to vote is conditional on having spent at least three years in Sweden prior to the election. Until 1998 Swedish elections at all levels were held every three years; since then they have been held every four years. The wait time before the first opportunity to vote thus differs substantially for immigrants immigrating just before this cutoff date versus just after. Our analysis shows that immigrants whose timing of arrival makes them eligible to vote after slightly more than three years in the country are not more likely to naturalize or vote in later elections compared to immigrants whose timing of arrival means they must wait six or seven years to vote. The results suggest that earlier opportunities for political participation do not improve subsequent political integration of immigrants as measured by naturalization and voting.