Affirmative Action, Competitive Intensity, and Effort: Evidence from Japanese speedboat racing

Japanese professional speedboat racing is one of the few sports where men and women compete in the same race, though the gender balance is skewed in favor of men. The Japan Motor Boat Racing Association randomly assigns racers to either single-sex or mixed-sex races and implemented a policy raising the minimum weight for male racers from 51kg to 52kg after November 1, 2020. The random assignment and the exogenous policy shock enable us to shed light on affirmative action policy, which can be regarded as a practice that reduces competitive intensity for female racers and to explore how it affects their incentives to exert effort. We use start time as a proxy measure of effort, as it is an objective absolute measure that is highly correlated with placements, and we use advanced starts, which result in disqualification and are a representation of risk-taking in an attempt to shorten start time to as close to zero seconds as possible, as a measure of risk-taking. Using over 175,000 female racer-race observations from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2022, we find that: (1) shifting from single-sex to mixed-sex races decreases the effort of middle- and low-ability female racers, while increasing the risk-taking behavior of high-ability female racers; (2) the policy change mitigates the discouragement effect on the effort of middle- and low-ability female racers when shifting from single-sex to mixed-sex races, whereas it has no effect on high-ability female racers; (3) overall, the affirmative action can promote the effort of female racers on average.