@techreport{5a6d37ff96f54988ad9b56ba1e7cdb84,
title = "Career Lotto: Labor supply in winner-take-all markets",
abstract = "Are people prone to selecting occupations with highly skewed income distributions despite minuscule chances of success? Assembling a comprehensive pool of potential teenage entrants into professional tennis (a typical winner-take-all market), we construct objective measures of relative ability and earnings projections. We find that prospective tennis professionals are attracted to right-skewed earnings distributions, independent of mean and variance. If skewness in prize money fell to zero, males would be 23% and females 5% less likely to continue pursuing a professional career, on average. Thus, winner-take-all labor markets appear to systematically encourage those with modest talents to pursue long-shot careers.",
author = "Wayne Grove and Michael Jetter and Papps, {Kerry L.}",
year = "2018",
month = dec,
language = "English",
series = "IZA Discussion Paper Series",
publisher = "IZA Institute for the Study of Labor",
number = "12012",
pages = "1--40",
type = "WorkingPaper",
institution = "IZA Institute for the Study of Labor",
}