The Stairways to Heaven: A Model of Career Choice in Sports and Games, with an Application to Chess

Abstract

We model individual careers in sports and games from initial entry to eventual exit or success as a discrete - choice, finite - horizon optimization problem. We apply this model to the international game of chess and study cross - country differences in the relative success of players. While we find no evidence that the players in our sample from the ex-Warsaw Pact are more talented than European and American players, there is evidence that they face lower training costs.