Managerial time constraints and young worker productivity: Natural experiments with NFL rookies

Abstract

The 2011 National Football League lockout and movement of the 2014 draft to a later date compressed the off‐seasons preceding the 2011 and 2014 seasons, exogenously tightening time constraints within which managers—head coaches and their staffs—engage in short‐run training of players. We exploit these natural experiments to investigate how this impacted the productivity of young workers (National Football League rookies). Results estimated for a sample of over 1,500 rookies support hypotheses emanating from an economic model of worker training time allocation and indicate reduced productivity along several dimensions. Survival analysis shows evidence of shorter player career durations along certain lines, suggesting longer term consequences.

Survival of Professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Teams: What Matters? A Research Note

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Strategic employment of immigrant and native workers: Was the green card lottery a game changer?

“…Analyzing each team over 14 seasons yields a balanced panel of 448 team‐year observations. As in Allen and Curington (2018), focusing on rookies enables observation of the cohorts of players who annually contribute most directly to the dynamic process by which new players enter the league as older players exit, with each team's and the league's immigrant‐native profile evolving as an observable artifact. Employer teams acquire first‐year players as part of an off‐season draft process common to all, ensuring that the employers participate in the same labor market process at the same time each year.…”

“…Analyzing each team over 14 seasons yields a balanced panel of 448 team-year observations. As in Allen and Curington (2018), focusing on rookies enables observation of the cohorts of players who annually contribute most directly to the dynamic process by which new players enter the league as older players exit, with each 11 The mechanism underlying this hypothesis illustrates, per Leiblein, Chen, and Rosen (2017), how uncertainty of a key resource ("asset") can interfere with the "emergence of competitive advantage" when organizations participate in strategic factor markets.…”

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