A growing literature has examined the causes of success in international soccer. We build on this literature by constructing a model of international success, as measured by the number of ''Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) points'' a national team has earned and by the resulting rank. We generate testable hypotheses about the impact of a nation's political regime, colonial heritage, and institutions on its soccer performance. Using ordinary least squares (OLS) and negative binomial regressions, we show that our proxies for these variables affect soccer performance. Specifically, we find that the international success of a country's club teams positively affects the national team's success.

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SummaryWe add to the literature on Olympic performance by explicitly studying the determinants of women’s performance at the Games.We estimate separate models of medal production for men and women over the last four Summer Olympic Games. The production of medals is a function of capital, labor, and total factor productivity (TFP). We use real GDP per capita and population - two variables that appear in almost all Olympic studies - as proxies for capital and labor. Our measure of TFP is a vector of variables that captures a nation’s willingness and ability to marshal its resources to promote Olympic performance and variables that determine its willingness to support its women. Because the dependent variable is a count measure, we estimate the production function using a negative binomial framework. We find that the determinants of success by a nation’s women closely resemble the determinants for its men. We also show that some determinants of gold medal counts differ from the determinants of silver and bronze medals. Our findings suggest that nations can improve the medal performance of men and women by following policies that increase the political and economic participation of women.

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Objective. We inquire whether the glass ceiling stems in part from the fact that women are more discouraged by setbacks than men are, as suggested by economic and psychological experiments. We use data from professional tennis to test this hypothesis. Method. We apply ordered probit, ordinary least squares, and binomial probit to data from the 2012 ATP and WTA tennis tours. Results. Women are not more likely than men to lose in straight sets or to lose the second two sets. Women who lose in straight sets win fewer games in the second set than men do. Women who lose the second set are more likely than men to withdraw from the third set. Conclusion. Women are not more likely to lose because of setbacks, but those who do tend to lose by wider margins than men. This suggests that the glass ceiling is not the result of women being more easily discouraged than men.The failure of women to reach the top of the corporate ladder has often been attributed to a glass ceiling limiting women's advancement. A large and growing economic literature suggests that the barrier to women's advancement is less a result of outright discrimination than of how women respond to the settings they face. 1 Poor responses to competitive situations could limit women's ability to rise even in the absence of external obstacles.This economic literature, based on the concept of rank-order tournaments (ROT), has arisen in two different areas. Sports economists have used the abundant data on performance and pay to analyze gender differences in nonexperimental settings. In contrast, experimental economists have sought to isolate gender differences in highly controlled settings. The two literatures come to different conclusions: the experimental literature finds a large disparity in how men and women respond to competitive settings, while the sports literature finds little or none.We use data on performance by professional tennis players on the men's and women's tours to test whether women respond worse than men to setbacks in competitive settings. The casual fan might not regard men's and women's tennis as comparable, since men's matches are best-of-five sets, while women's are best-of-three. However, since 2007, only