TY - JOUR AU - Bracha, Anat AU - Cohen, Alma AU - Conell-Price, Lynn TI - The Heterogeneous Effect of Affirmative Action on Performance JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 25322 PY - 2018 Y2 - December 2018 DO - 10.3386/w25322 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w25322 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w25322.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Anat Bracha Research Department 600 Atlantic Ave Boston, MA 02210 E-Mail: anat.bracha@bos.frb.org Alma Cohen Harvard Law School 1525 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 E-Mail: alcohen@law.harvard.edu Lynn Conell-Price 5000 Forbes Avenue BP 208 Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA E-Mail: lynncp@wharton.upenn.edu AB - This paper experimentally investigates the effect of gender-based affirmative action (AA) on performance in the lab, focusing on a tournament environment. The tournament is based on GRE math questions commonly used in graduate school admission, and at which women are known to perform worse on average than men. We find heterogeneous effect of AA on female participants: AA lowers the performance of high-ability women and increases the performance of low-ability women. Our results are consistent with two possible mechanisms—one is that AA changes incentives differentially for low- and high-ability women, and the second is that AA triggers stereotype threat. ER -