Confidence enhanced performance? – The causal effects of success on future performance in professional golf tournaments

•We use regression discontinuity models to estimate the effects of past successes on performance.•Using data from European golf tournaments, we show evidence of potent causal effects.•Past successes are more important when there is more money and prestige at stake.•We interpret the effect as the impact of increased confidence. This paper provides field evidence on the causal impact of past successes on future performances. Since persistence in success or failure is likely to be linked through, potentially time-varying, ability it is intrinsically difficult to identify the causal effect of succeeding on the probability of performing well in the future. We therefore employ a regression discontinuity design on data from professional golf tournaments exploiting that almost equally skilled players are separated into successes and failures half-way into the tournaments (the “cut”). We show that players who (marginally) succeeded in making the cut substantially increased their performance in subsequent tournaments relative to players who (marginally) failed to make the cut. This success-effect is substantially larger when the subsequent (outcome) tournament involves more prize money. The results therefore suggest that past successes provide an important prerequisite when performing high-stakes tasks.