Peer Competition: Evidence from 5- to 95-Year-olds
1 : University Paris-Saclay
University Paris-Saclay, University paris saclay
2 : Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique (CREST)
Centre de Recherche en Économie et STatistique (CREST)
Good peers may help you learn, but they may also steal your spotlight. We use the panel of chess players in the French club championship to document this trade-off. With an instrumental variable strategy based on club closures, we show that better clubmates help players improve, but only when they do not monopolize the (good) opportunities to play. For players at the bottom of the club distribution, positive externalities are offset by competition. Junior players, who enjoy a steep learning curve, suffer more from peer competition in the short-run, but they may also reap higher benefits in the long-run.
