The Tiger Woods Effect

[octavio]

For those who have read the paper, how does the author control for the possibility that as econphilo notes, golfers face tougher golf courses for more prestigious tournaments?

Course dummies.

[bauble]

For those who have read the paper, how does the author control for the possibility that as econphilo notes, golfers face tougher golf courses for more prestigious tournaments?

You look at the courses where Tiger has sometimes played. I think she does this. Course dummies won't work if Tiger in field is perfectly correlated with them

[manet]

(2) Once again: Please stop knocking other people's job market papers until you have done serious applied work of your own. I'm sure your job market papers will all deal with truly significant world problems and will pass muster with undergrad econ majors everywhere, but until then...maybe you could tone down the pomposity?

I love this logic, you can't criticize X until you have done serious work in X. I guess most art critics, political pundits, movie reviewers, football commentators, etc. should all be ashamed and quit their jobs immediately.

[AstralTraveller]

I love this logic, you can't criticize X until you have done serious work in X. I guess most art critics, political pundits, movie reviewers, football commentators, etc. should all be ashamed and quit their jobs immediately.

And who says they shouldn't?

[kkitkat]

I love this logic, you can't criticize X until you have done serious work in X. I guess most art critics, political pundits, movie reviewers, football commentators, etc. should all be ashamed and quit their jobs immediately.

Well, the logic is that one should at least read the damn thing before criticizing it. The point of the paper is that although the analyzed example refers to golf, results can be generalized to a situation with competition prize and superstar, like one you may find, as someone mentioned here, in the corporate world where bonuses might be used to induce performance, but if one person keeps getting these bonuses it gives a desincentive to others to perform at their best. I don't see how one can claim that it is irrelevant and "disturbingly unimportant". I only hope that after 5 years I'll be able to produce a paper which is on one hand a fun paper to read and on the other deals with something important. Not everything important has to be dry.

[Fulbrighterpak]

well if it was not a serious enough topic a lot of prof at UC Berkeley would not let her write the paper on it. I am sure people at Berkeley know a thing or two about economics and academic placements....

So I would not jump on the bandwagon and call it "Fun Paper" ....

[econphilomath]

I haven't read the paper but went to the seminar. The point of the paper went beyond golf - incentive schemes which are like touraments in that one's relative performance, rather than one's absolute performance, is used to determine one's payoff, are used outside of sports.

One example is that a boss at a real estate firm might give a big bonus to the best performer, (I think this is the example she used) at the office. It sounds like it would make the real estate agents want to work hard for a big bonus, but if one person consistently outperforms everyone, then why would everyone else want to exert extra effort for almost no expected payoff?

In golf, the idea is that you can exert extra effort by getting to the course early, taking extra care on your shots, etc.

Well that sounds much more interesting. However, I should note this is a forum not a seminar, and that I said i didn't read it. It just seemed pretty trivial for a job market paper to test some golf result. Fun yes , very important no. Oh and there are TONS of unimportant theories too

If it is set in a larger question regarding incentives etc its another story. I would not have said my comment in a seminar withut having read the paper and made my comment in a passing way noting I had not read it. Sorry if it was too harsh. Still it sounds weird though.

I think you need more than course dummies. Prize amounts, could help. Still havent read the paper yet. I will wait for Freakonomics II to read about it

As for Berkeley profs knowing if its important or not, that would also be my prior. However not everyone does important, relevant or even good job market papers and end up never being read and people do get crappy jobs, so "job market status" doesn't necesarily assure quality....

[asianeconomist]

OK I read this paper earlier than probably anybody here (not that it matters anyway), and thought of it as a rather interesting paper.

For one, its implications can be carried over to other fields (as depicted by the real-estate example) and the model is also tractable and realistic (Stigler).

Many would probably question that whether this constitutes a substantial addition to the literature. However, how can we determine that from an objective viewpoint. Remember Akerlof's seminal paper and how many times it was rejected by editors (who are supposedly much better adjudicators of economic contributions). Now, it would be fool-hardy to compare this paper with that of Akerlof's, but I am just trying to draw a comparison between similar cases. In the final analysis, this paper might just turn out to be a unimportant contribution, but I don't think that allows us to comment on the relative importance of the paper.

However, I am all for criticizing the methodology of the paper - I fully agree with econphilomath's suggestions. But I am not entirely empathetic to the
criticisms directed towards its contribution.

[revealedpreference]

Jen Brown accepted an offer at Kellogg and has R&Rs at QJE and JPE. So, once again, the level of discourse in this place is pretty awful. Get some facts before you post.

[econphilomath]

Jen Brown accepted an offer at Kellogg and has R&Rs at QJE and JPE. So, once again, the level of discourse in this place is pretty awful. Get some facts before you post.

Oh wait we can't say anything on this board before going through a literature review? Gimme a break.

Besides, having a job a Kellogg is great and I will update my priors about my best estimate on the quality of the paper accordingly but....this is not a seminar and I can voice my admittedly uniformed opinion regarding the importance of "a golf paper".

Besides there are tons of papers which you might consider "bad" or "not relevant" which are published in QJE etc so spare me the publication worship.

Bottom line for me regarding methods, is I don't think you can properly control for some things even going through all the metrics procedures you want. It just doesn't convince me. I don't think the methods are enough. Maybe this is not one of those cases, maybe it is.