In a new paper, Shekhar Aiyar and Rodney Ramcharan use international cricket data to examine the role of luck in labor market outcomes. They find that “a player’s debut performance is strongly affected by an exogenous source of variation: whether the debut series is played at home or abroad.” The authors also find that first game performance has a “large and persistent impact” on cricket players’ careers over the long run as well, in part because management uses information inefficiently. In other words, luck (in this case, making one’s debut at home instead of away) affects cricket players’ careers over both the short and long term. The authors caution against generalizing their results, but do suggest that “luck might figure more widely in labor market outcomes than commonly believed.” [%comments]
What Can Cricket Data Tell Us About Labor Luck?
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As a keen follower of cricket (among other sports) I was happy to see this paper. I was, however, intrigued at this part, where the paper cites other papers writing about sports: “On sumo-wresting Duggan and Levitt (2002) examine match-rigging in Japanese tournaments.”
Who is this Duggan?
Millsy
Thanks. I will take a look at that.
Cy
Please they’re called batsmen not ‘batters’ don’t sully the game of cricket with jargon from its upstart cousin baseball.
Oliver,
My apologies. I need slack, as I’m a poor, baseball obsessed soul.
Millsy & Oliver,
as a cricket-obsessed Aussie I can tell you that over here it is quite common to call batsmen “batters”, including by british commentators on Australian TV.
Why? I dunno. There are two possible reasons I suppose
1 – bleeding of baseball terminology into the game (i.e. Oliver’s apparent position), or
2 – gender neutrality. While the women’s version of the game gets only small participation and TV coverage it actually picks up a bit of media here, especially on radio (not match broadcasts, just scores & fixtures). It’s possible the ACB / Cricket Australia have promoted the use of the term here to limit people struggling for “batswoman” or something. I have heard the CEO of Cricket Australia use the term so (2) is actually my pick – at least here.
I probably should go read the paper which is the actual topic of this month-old post, expecting neither of you will ever read this comment.