The central theme of this dissertation is understanding the role of individual differences in competitiveness on labor and marriage market outcomes and gender differences therein. The three chapters in this dissertation use economic experiments and surveys to study this question.

The first chapter uses a laboratory experiment to study gender differences in competitiveness in terms of entry and effort decisions. Using a novel stated-effort tournament entry experiment that directly observes both entry and efforts, this chapter extends prior literature, which has focused on gender differences in competitive entry.

The second chapter uses a representative household survey to study the relationship between individuals’ competitiveness and their own and spousal labor market outcomes. Strongly gendered results are found where women’s competitiveness influences the male partner’s income, while men’s competitiveness does not correlate with the female partner’s income.

The third chapter uses an experiment and a student survey to study how competitiveness and gender-role attitudes jointly shape students’ labor and marriage market expectations. I study two culturally distinct samples, graduate students at a business school in China and undergraduate students at a large U.S. university, and document significant heterogeneity across gender and culture.