Termination Risk and Agency Problems: Evidence from the NBA

Abstract

When agents face a risk of termination by the principal in the short term, they may underinvest in projects whose results would be realized only in the long term. We use data on decisions made by NBA coaches to study how risk of termination by the principal affects the behavior of agents. Because letting a rookie play produces long-term benefits on which coaches with a shorter investment horizon might place lower weight, we hypothesize that higher termination risk might lead to lower rookie participation. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that, during the period of the NBA's 1999 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) and controlling for the characteristics of rookies and their teams, higher termination risk was associated with lower rookie participation and that this association was driven by important games. We also find that the association does not exist for second-year players and that the identified association disappeared when the 2005 CBA gave team owners stronger incentives to monitor the performance of rookies and preclude their underuse. JEL Classification: D20, J44, K00, L83 * We would like to thank Lucian Bebchuk, Liran Einav, Yaniv Grinstein, Saul Lach, Yona Rubinstein, Analia Schlosser, Charles Wang and workshop participants at Harvard, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and IDC for helpful comments and conversations, and Zvika Messing for valuable research assistance. ᵼ Harvard Law School, Tel-Aviv University, and NBER ᵵ Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) ᵴ Tel-Aviv University 1