We study how partners in a household make decisions for themselves and for their spouses regarding intertemporal choices in a field experiment in rural China. We find that men, but not women, make decisions that are more patient for their spouses compared with their predictions of their spouses’ decisions, in particular when choices involved two delayed options. Instead the decisions for their spouse are close to the decisions they made for themselves. At the same time, we find evidence of sorting of preferences within households, i.e.

This paper examines how gender differences in behavioural preferences affect the gender wage gap in Vietnam. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment to measure preferences for risk and negotiation and administer a complementary survey to collect data on wages and observable factors that affect wages. In our sample, women earn less than men but differences in observable characteristics across gender cannot explain the gender wage gap, i.e. most of the gender gap is unexplained. Our experimental results show that women are more risk-averse and have a lower propensity to negotiate.

AbstractCultural norms diverge substantially across societies, often within the same country. We propose and investigate a self-domestication/selective migration hypothesis, proposing that cultural differences along the individualism–collectivism dimension are driven by the out-migration of individualistic people from collectivist core regions of states to peripheral frontier areas, and that such patterns of historical migration are reflected even in the current distribution of cultural norms.