The Stairways to Heaven: A Model of Career Choice in Sports and Games, with an Application to Chess

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 no evidence that the players in our sample from the ex-Warsaw Pact are more talented than European and American players, there is evidence that they face lower training costs.