This paper provides an economic rationale for overachieving behavior in non-professional activities in the labour market. The intrinsically motivated worker uses his achievement in the non-professional activity to signal his work ethic. When the worker‘s career concern is weak, he exerts no...

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...

It is difficult to test the prediction that future career prospects create implicit effort incentives because researchers cannot randomly “assign” career prospects to economic agents. To overcome this challenge, we use data from professional soccer, where employees of the same club face...

It is difficult to test the prediction that future career prospects create implicit effort incentives because researchers cannot randomly “assign” career prospects to economic agents. To overcome this challenge, we use data from professional soccer, where employees of the same club face...