Game, Set, and Match: Do Women and Men Perform Differently in Competitive Situations?

Michael Jetter and Jay Walker ()

No 8934, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper analyzes potential gender differences in competitive environments using a sample of over 100,000 professional tennis matches. We focus on two phenomena of the labor and sports economics literature: the hot-hand and clutch-player effects. First, we find strong evidence for the hot-hand (cold-hand) effect. Every additional win in the most recent ten Tour matches raises the likelihood of prevailing in the current encounter by 3.1 (males) to 3.3 percentage points (females). Second, top male and female players are excelling in Grand Slam tournaments, arguably the most important events in tennis. For men, we also find evidence for top players winning more tie-breaks at Grand Slams. Overall, we find virtually no gender differences for the hot-hand effect and only minor distinctions for the clutch-player effect.

Keywords: gender gap; competition; hot hand; clutch player; tennis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D84 J24 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2015, 119, 96-108

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8934.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Game, set, and match: Do women and men perform differently in competitive situations? (2015)
Working Paper: Game, set, and match: Do women and men perform differently in competitive situations? (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8934

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().