IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rza/ersawp/806.html

Competition and Gender in the Lab vs Field: Experiments from off-grid Renewable Energy Entrepreneurs in Rural Rwanda

Author

Listed:
  • Manuel F. Barron
  • Martine Visser
  • Rebecca A. Klege
  • Rowan P. Clarke

Abstract

We examine how gender attitudes and performance under competitive situations in the lab reflect microenterprise outcomes in the renewable energy sector of Rwanda – a country with progressive gender policies despite its traditional patriarchal setup. We adopt the standard Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) experimental design in addition to a unique dataset from off-grid microenterprises, managed by entrepreneurs who were working in mixed and single-sex teams prior to the lab experiments. After a piece-rate and a tournament compensation schemes, participants are offered to the opportunity to choose their compensation scheme between these two options in a third round. We find that female entrepreneurs are not less likely to compete and are not outperformed by male entrepreneurs. This stands in contrast to several studies, mostly conducted on university students of developed countries. Furthermore, we leverage administrative and self-reported business data to show that the female entrepreneurs who chose to compete in the lab perform as well as their male counterparts, providing some external validity to our lab results.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Manuel F. Barron & Martine Visser & Rebecca A. Klege & Rowan P. Clarke, 2020. "Competition and Gender in the Lab vs Field: Experiments from off-grid Renewable Energy Entrepreneurs in Rural Rwanda," ERSA Working Paper Series 806, Economic Research Southern Africa.
    • Handle: RePEc:rza:ersawp:806
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Klege, Rebecca A. & Amuakwa-Mensah, Franklin & Visser, Martine, 2022. "Tenancy and energy choices in Rwanda. A replication and extension study," World Development Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 26(C).
    3. Dandan Ye & Hossein Ahmadi Dehrashid & Hossein Moayedi & Atefeh Ahmadi Dehrashid, 2025. "Investigating the spatial foundations of rural entrepreneurship development using a hybrid method of MCDM, ANN and DTree algorithm," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 27(10), pages 25177-25209, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • Q49 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Other

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rza:ersawp:806. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Maggi Sigg (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://ersawps.org/index.php/working-paper-series/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.