Current Research Projects

1. Is Wage Dispersion Just a Proxy for Ability Dispersion? Evidence from MLS

   Joint with Dennis Coates

   [Revise & Resubmit]

   Does salary dispersion capture how unequally teams pay their players, or does it simply reflect differences in ability? The distinction matters because tournament theory predicts that larger pay gaps may strengthen incentives, while cohesion theory suggests that they may undermine cooperation. We use Major League Soccer team-season data from 2007 to 2023 and combine several measures of salary dispersion with measures of how concentrated player performance is within a team. We find that salary dispersion remains a significant determinant of team production even after accounting for performance dispersion, so it is not merely a proxy for differences in ability. Measures of performance concentration are also jointly related to team outcomes. In particular, teams perform worse when goals and assists are concentrated among fewer players, whereas concentrated fouls are associated with better performance. Overall, the results are more consistent with cohesion theory and show that both the distribution of pay and the distribution of on-field contributions matter for team performance.

2. Do Individuals Respond to Salary Dispersion?

   Joint with Dennis Coates

   [Revise & Resubmit]

   Most empirical studies testing theories that link pay dispersion to firm output analyze outcomes at the organizational level. Workers’ responses to pay dispersion are therefore typically inferred indirectly from its association with organizational performance. Few studies estimate these responses at the individual level, largely because individual contributions are difficult to measure. Professional sports offer a way around this problem. Using Major League Soccer data, we estimate the relationship between individual player performance and pay dispersion using four alternative measures of dispersion. Our results show that individual performance is related primarily to the component of within-team pay differences that cannot be explained by observable measures of player performance. In other words, pay differences that are not attributable to expected on-field performance may be associated with changes in players’ individual contributions. These findings therefore support the possibility that the relationship between pay dispersion and team outcomes operates through changes in individual player performance.

3. Do Women Perform Worse When Competing with Men? Evidence from Mixed-Doubles Curling

   Joint with Dennis Coates and Gleb Vasiliev

   [Partial Draft]

   Do women perform worse when they compete directly with men? Mixed-doubles curling provides a rare field setting in which every team consists of one woman and one man, both compete under identical conditions, and every shot receives an execution grade. We use shot-level data from the World Mixed Doubles Curling Championships and the Olympic Winter Games, covering 804 games, 40 teams, and 66,632 shots. We compare men’s and women’s shot quality and examine whether any gap emerges on final shots, in close games, or in tactically difficult situations. Performance declines are more closely associated with tactical difficulty: being behind, facing a multi-point threat, and crowded stone configurations are more consequential than score pressure alone. Women’s shot quality appears more sensitive to opponent-stone congestion in the full sample, but removal shots are harder for both genders and the difference is not strongly gender-specific. However, women take the final and most consequential shot in more than 90% of ends. We are currently investigating what drives this disproportionate allocation of roles and whether the apparent performance penalty for women reflects gender-specific differences or, instead, the roles they are assigned.

4. Gender Differences in Performance Under Pressure

   Joint with Dennis Coates and Gleb Vasiliev

   [Full Draft]

   Competitive pressure may affect men’s and women’s performance differently, but clean comparisons are difficult when performance cannot be measured under equivalent conditions. Curling provides an unusually precise setting for such a comparison: men and women compete under the same rules, and every shot is graded according to how well it achieves its intended task. We analyze 123,947 shot situations from 9,544 men’s and women’s matches played between 2001 and 2024, focusing on the last four shots of each of the final four ends, all taken by team leaders, or skips. We define pressure using several score-differential thresholds and compare performance on common and less common shot types while controlling for players’ prior ability. We find that both men and women perform worse under pressure, regardless of how pressure is defined. However, the decline is not significantly different by gender. Women receive lower grades on average, holding pressure constant, but this difference becomes smaller for more commonly attempted shots. The results remain robust when we control for players’ performance over the previous year. The evidence therefore suggests that pressure affects elite curlers of both genders, while task familiarity helps explain the remaining differences in performance.