Identifying an individual worker's contribution to firm production can be difficult in a team setting where spillovers in labor productivity exist among team members. This paper studies a model of labor productivity where workers have heterogeneous abilities, and can differently affect the productivity of their fellow teammates. Applying the model to the setting of the National Basketball Association (NBA), I can identify the marginal value that a basketball player brings to a particular team lineup, both through his own individual contributions and his complementary contribution to teammates' productivity. Estimates from the model imply that teammates have a significant impact on individual player productivity, and that taking into account spillovers across teammates is important to assessing both overall team productivity and an individual player's contribution to team productivity. I then evaluate whether player complementarities are valued in the NBA labor market in terms of higher salaries, and find that they are undervalued, and that players are instead paid mainly for their individual offensive production. This creates an asymmetry between player incentives and the team objective. To assess the size of this inefficiency, the top trading cycle algorithm of Shapley and Scarf (1974) is used to identify a Pareto optimal matching between players and teams, that accounts for the complementarities between heterogeneous players' skill sets. (JEL J30, L25, L83, M51)
I study why local banking markets became dominated by multimarket firms following deregulation in the 1990s. I estimate a model of branch entry that allows for spillovers across markets. The spillovers complicate estimation, and so I develop a revealed preference approach that also deals with unobserved firm and market heterogeneity. I then analyze the impact of multimarket banks and find that they increase local competition, but that they also open more branches than single‐market firms, and subsequently offer lower deposit rates. Ultimately, their welfare impact differs across markets based on the availability of outside alternatives and consumer sensitivity to rates.
This paper studies how bidding strategies and auction outcomes are affected by downstream competition, particularly for USFS timber auctions. This is done by extending the auction estimation literature to a model where outside competition affects bidding behavior in that bidders are then not only concerned with whether they win the auction, but also the identity of the winner if it is not them. Applying the estimation technique to the case of timber auctions, I find that downstream competition in the lumber industry affects the bidding behavior of mill bidders, sometimes leading to the misallocation of timber tracts.
Workers entering the labor market often face a trade off between job matches that maximizes their short run and long run compensation. This trade off is influenced by peers who may enhance or diminish the worker’s productivity, and thus affect their future salary. We study this question for rookies in the National Basketball Association (NBA). We find that for rookies drafted between 2011 and 2017, playing with teammates that facilitated them getting 1 additional point per 100 possessions was predicted to increase the value of their second contract by between 9.9% and 23.6%. This implies that being drafted by the team that provides the ‘best fit’ is an important determinant of a rookie’s future earnings.
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