Can barely winning lead to losing? Gender and past performance

We use high-volume data from professional tennis to estimate the causal effect of past on current performance for women and men. To identify this effect, we exploit double faults as exogenous shocks to past performance. We estimate that men do not react to near setbacks in the past. In contrast, women perform considerably worse after near setbacks. Heterogeneity analysis reveals different effects depending on experience, ability, and the intermediate score. Our results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks. A potential explanation for our findings are gender differences in negative psychological momentum.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Automated summary

This study uses high-volume data from professional tennis to estimate the causal effect of past on current performance for women and men. Double faults are utilized as exogenous shocks to past performance to identify this effect. The findings show that men do not react significantly to near setbacks in the past, while women perform considerably worse after near setbacks. The heterogeneity analysis reveals different effects depending on experience, ability, and the intermediate score. The results are robust to several sensitivity checks and suggest that gender differences in negative psychological momentum may explain the findings.