Overconfidence and Gender Differences in Wage Expectations

Arbeitspapier

We analyze the impact of (over-)confidence on gender differences in expected starting salaries using elicited beliefs of prospective university students in Germany. According to our results, female students have lower wage expectations and are less overconfident than their male counterparts. Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions of the mean show that 7.7% of the gender gap in wage expectations is attributable to a higher overconfidence of males. Decompositions of the unconditional quantiles of expected salaries suggest that the contribution of gender differences in confidence to the gender gap is particularly strong at the bottom and top of the wage expectation distribution.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 13517

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination ; Expectations; Speculations ; Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making‡ ; Single Equation Models; Single Variables: Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models; Quantile Regressions
• Subject: gender pay gap ; wage expectations ; overconfidence ; decomposition analyses ; unconditional quantile regressions (RIF-Regressions)

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Briel, Stephanie ; Osikominu, Aderonke ; Pfeifer, Gregor ; Reutter, Mirjam ; Satlukal, Sascha
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2020

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/223959
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET