Can barely winning lead to losing? Gender and past performance.

• We identify gender differences in reaction to past performance in tennis. • Competition and profit opportunities are very similar for both genders in professional tennis. • We rely on exogenous shocks affecting past performance to identify a causal effect. • We estimate sizeable negative momentum affect for women, but not men. • Effect is driven by: absolute ability, experience, and intermediate scores. We use high-volume data from professional tennis to estimate the causal effect of past on current performance for women and men. To identify this effect, we exploit double faults as exogenous shocks to past performance. We estimate that men do not react to near setbacks in the past. In contrast, women perform considerably worse after near setbacks. Heterogeneity analysis reveals different effects depending on experience, ability, and the intermediate score. Our results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks. A potential explanation for our findings are gender differences in negative psychological momentum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]