The Swiss system is an increasingly popular competition format as it provides a favourable trade-off between the number of matches and ranking accuracy. However, there is no empirical study on the potential unfairness of Swiss-system chess tournaments if an odd number of rounds is played. To analyse this issue, our paper compares the number of points scored in the tournament between players who played one game more with the white pieces and players who played one game fewer with the white pieces. Using data from 28 highly prestigious competitions, we find that players with an extra white game score significantly more points. In particular, the advantage exceeds the value of a draw in the four Grand Swiss tournaments. A potential solution to this unfairness could be organising Swiss-system chess tournaments with an even number of rounds, and guaranteeing a balanced colour assignment for all players using a recently proposed pairing mechanism.

I examine whether early but temporary access to low-barrier hospitality employment affects refugees' labor market integration. I exploit within-region, within-year variation by combining the quasi-exogenous allocation of refugees to Austrian regions with seasonality in hospitality, where 25% of refugees first find work. Labor market access during high seasonal demand raises early employment probability by 3 percentage points (9% of the mean). Employment gains fade after one year, but treated refugees accumulate significantly higher three-year earnings, with no differences in medium-term wages or job quality. However, early hospitality work increases segregation into refugee-typical industries and firms with fewer Austrian coworkers.

Suppose $μ$ and $ν$ are probability measures on $\mathbb{R}$ satisfying $μ\leq_{cx} ν$. Let $a$ and $b$ be convex functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with $a \geq b \geq 0$. We are interested in finding $$\sup_{\mathbf{M}} \sup_τ \mathbb{E}^{\mathbf{M}} \left[ a(X) I_{ \{ τ= 1 \} } + b(Y) I_{ \{ τ= 2 \} } \right] $$ where the first supremum is taken over consistent models $\mathbf{M}$ (i.e., filtered probability spaces $(Ω, \mathbf{F}, \mathbb{F}, \mathbb{P})$ such that $Z=(z,Z_1,Z_2)=(\int_{\mathbb{R}} x μ(dx) = \int_{\mathbb{R}} y ν(dy), X, Y)$ is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$ martingale, where $X$ has law $μ$ and $Y$ has law $ν$ under $\mathbb{P}$) and $τ$ in the second supremum is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$-stopping time taking values in $\{1,2\}$. Our contributions are first to characterise and simplify the dual problem, and second to completely solve the problem under some structural assumptions on the measures $μ$ and $ν$ (namely that $μ$ and $ν$ are absolutely continuous probability measures that satisfy the Dispersion Assumption). A key finding is that the canonical set-up in which the filtration is that generated by $Z$ is not rich enough to define an optimal model and additional randomisation is required. This holds even though the marginal laws $μ$ and $ν$ are atom-free. The problem has an interpretation of finding the robust, or model-free, no-arbitrage bound on the price of a Bermudan option with two possible exercise dates, given the prices of co-maturing European options.