Engel, J.F. : Chess, Gender and Tournament Dynamics
Rejection and failure are inevitable aspects of a career. Using 286,140 chess games of 3,523 title-holding players in a cash-prize tournament series I study gender differences in reactions to a loss in a highly competitive environment. Due to the 11 rounds per tournament, its weekly nature, and a well-defined eligible player pool, I can examine players' short and long-run reactions to losses. While the quality of men's chess games decreases after a loss, women play more precisely. Men react stronger than women in all short-term measures. Immediately following a loss, men are more likely to use riskier opening choices, while women are nonreactive. Men are more likely to quit an ongoing tournament after losing. Considering the long run participation, there is no evidence of gender differences in the time to re-enter competition or investment into skills conditional on past performance. The results suggest that for career-minded individuals gender differences in willingness to compete may not be as large as previously assumed in the presence of neutral feedback.
Draft available upon request.
Media:
Awards
Best Poster Award at the 3rd Berlin Workshop on Empirical Public Economics: Gender Economics
Best Paper Award at the 2025 Young Economists' Meeting (YEM) in Brno, Czech Republic
Cubel, M; Engel, J.F.; Nüß, P.; Sanchez-Pages, S.: Captured by Conflict: Evidence from War on the Board
This study examines how war affects cognitive performance by analyzing chess games played by Ukrainian players during the Russian invasion. Using data from over 400,000 chess games played between 2020-2023, combined with geolocated air raid alarm data, we provide novel insights on how war-related stress affects high-level cognitive tasks. Our identification strategy exploits the variation in exposure to conflict across Ukrainian regions and the objective nature of chess performance metrics. Using computer-evaluated accuracy scores and detailed move-by-move analysis, we find that air raid alarms are associated with significant decreases in players' cognitive performance. Players in regions with frequent air raid alerts show greater deterioration in decision-making quality than those in less-targeted areas. The effects are particularly pronounced in the complex middle and endgame stages, where strategic planning and creative problem-solving are crucial. These findings contribute to understanding war's broader societal costs, highlighting previously unmeasured cognitive burdens on civilian populations, and have potential implications for productivity and economic activity in conflict zones.
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Engel, J.F. : Second Shift Meets Market: An Evaluation of Household Labor's Price in Germany
Abstract: Using time use data in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) I document the evolution of the gender care gap over the span of almost three decades (1992-2017). In the time span studied the differences in time spent on unpaid labor between men and women decreased. However, the care gap reduction is primarily caused by women reducing their amount of housework rather than men increasing it. The data is then combined with estimates for the value of the household tasks being performed to find that households, especially women generate substantial amounts of value through unpaid work comparable to at least a part-time job.
Draft available upon request.
I4R Discussion Paper Series, No. 12
Abstract
We conduct a replication of Settele (2022), a online survey experiment designed to find out how individual’s beliefs about the gender wage gap affect their policy preferences. We reproduce Results 1 and 2 of the study: how prior beliefs around the wage gap are distributed among individuals and how a information treatment causally affects the policy demand. Our re-coded replication shows that the reported results are robust.
The replication was part of the larger paper Brodeur, Mikola, Cook et al.: Mass Reproducibility and Replicability: A New Hope, I4R Discussion Paper Series No. 107
Engel, J.F.; Nüß, P.; Rudolph, M; Schwarz, J.: A Comment on "Taste-Based Gender Favouritism in High-Stakes Decisions: Evidence from the Price is Right"
I4R Discussion Paper Series, No. 151
Abstract
We conduct a computational replication of Atanasov et al. (2023). In total, our analysis covers three variations: we use the cleaned dataset provided in the replication package, we clean the original data ourselves, and finally we extend the dataset to encompass an additional three years of data using the webscraper provided by the authors. The additional data boosts the final observation count by approximately one-quarter. We find that the results are robust; the data in the replication package results in nearly the same estimates and an extension of the data and specifications reduces the effect size and statistical significance, but does not change the conclusions. We further conduct a wide range of robustness checks. While some estimates have smaller effect sizes and lower statistical significance, all results support the original findings.