The effect of management changes on winning in professional sports: Analysis using a dynamic lag adjustment model

Abstract

This paper examines whether coaching and general manager (GM) changes among three professional sports leagues—the National Football League (NFL), the Major League Baseball (MLB), and the National Basketball Association (NBA)—effect on‐field performance. Our empirical methodology uses team‐level data by season and adapts a lag adjustment econometric approach designed to resolve several statistical challenges that arise both in general managerial settings and in sports settings. Our main finding is that coaching changes in the NFL boost the number of wins per season by between 0.5 and 1.2 in each of the first five seasons. Coaching changes have smaller, but still positive, impacts in the MLB and NBA. For all the three leagues, we find that GM changes have no discernable impact on performance. A separate cross‐sectional analysis suggests that those small impacts stem from coaches and GMs having extremely compressed talent distributions. The data indicate that coaches and GMs, en masse, are important, but changing the people who occupy those positions rarely seems to move teams to different locations on the performance distribution.

Can international students help enhance China's urban innovation?

“…Equation mainly examines the effect of international students on urban innovation based on a two‐way fixed‐effect model. Considering the dynamic characteristics of the effect of international students on urban innovation at different levels, we follow Goff et al (2019) and Yang et al (2021) to use the quantile regression model to investigate the dynamic track of the impact of international students on urban innovation. In Equation , q is the quantile reflecting the marginal effect of international students on urban innovation.…”

Career concerns and personnel investment in the Major League Baseball player draft

“…Smart and Wolfe (2003) and Smart et al (2008) find that on-field managers have a minimal effect on team performance. Goff et al (2019) find that coaching changes have a very small impact on team performance and that GM changes have no effect, findings they attribute to these managers being drawn from a compressed segment of the talent distribution. Juravich et al (2017) find that certain GM characteristics, in particular education level and playing experience, are positively related to team performance.…”

“…Goff et al. (2019) find that coaching changes have a very small impact on team performance and that GM changes have no effect, findings they attribute to these managers being drawn from a compressed segment of the talent distribution. Juravich et al.…”

Sports team success and managerial decisions: the role of playing-time concentration

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“…The within variation reflected managers changing teams during the sample period. Goff et al (2019) extended this analysis by using a dynamic lag adjustment model to account for differences in the impact of a manager's decisions over time, again using manager fixed effects to capture managerial ability and decisions. Results from this model show that team winning percentage increased in the first five years after a new manager took over a team.…”