Setbacks are inevitable in professional life, yet we know little about how people respond to them. I study how men and women respond to failure in a highly competitive setting, using 286,140 games from 3,523 titled chess players in a weekly tournament series. The weekly, 11-round structure and fixed player pool allow me to track both short- and long-term responses to losses. After a loss, men play less accurately, choose riskier openings, and are more likely to quit the tournament. In contrast, women maintain or improve their performance, showing greater resilience. Over the long run, however, men and women are equally likely to reenter tournaments and invest in skill development, conditional on past outcomes. These findings suggest that short-term emotional responses differ by gender, but longer-term competitive choices are primarily skill- and success-driven.
[Paper formerly known as "Chess, Gender, and Tournament Dynamics"]
Find the paper here
Awards:
Best Paper Award at the 2025 Young Economists' Meeting (YEM) in Brno, Czech Republic
Best Poster Award at the 3rd Berlin Workshop on Empirical Public Economics: Gender Economics
Captured by Conflict: Evidence from War on the Board
with Maria Cubel, Patrick Nüß, and Santiago Sanchez-Pages
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.
Media: Interview with ChessBase
Mass Reproducibility and Replicability: A New Hope [R & R, Nature]
with Abel Brodeur, Derek Mikola, Nikolai Cook, and several others
This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we uncover a high rate of fully computationally reproducible results (over 85%). Second, excluding minor issues like missing packages or broken pathways, we uncover coding errors for about 25% of studies, with some studies containing multiple errors. Third, we test the robustness of the results to 5,511 re-analyses. We find a robustness reproducibility of about 70%. Robustness reproducibility rates are relatively higher for re-analyses that introduce new data and lower for re-analyses that change the sample or the definition of the dependent variable. Fourth, 52% of re-analysis effect size estimates are smaller than the original published estimates and the average statistical significance of a re-analysis is 77% of the original. Lastly, we rely on six teams of researchers working independently to answer eight additional research questions on the determinants of robustness reproducibility. Most teams find a negative relationship between replicators' experience and reproducibility, while finding no relationship between reproducibility and the provision of intermediate or even raw data combined with the necessary cleaning codes.
Replication Report: How Do Beliefs About the Gender Wage Gap Affect the Demand for Public Policy?
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.
Replication Report: A Comment on "Taste-Based Gender Favouritism in High-Stakes Decision: Evidence from the Price is Right"
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.