There are two, count 'em TWO new working papers on the NBER website. Maybe this sports econ thingy is going to become a big thing. BIG, I say!
I haven't read but their abstracts at this time.
The first one is "The Hot Hand in the NBA 3-Point Contest: The Importance of Location, Location, Location by Robert M. Lantis and Erik T. Nesson. Here's the link. Here's the abstract.
Do basketball players exhibit a hot hand? Results from controlled shooting situations suggest the answer is yes, while results from in-game shooting are mixed. Are the differing results because a hot hand is only present in similar shots or because testing for the hot hand in game situations is difficult? Combining repeated shots in a location and shots across locations, the NBA 3-Point Contests mimics game situations without many of the confounding factors. Using data on the 1986-2019 contests, we find a hot hand, but only within shot locations. Shooting streaks increase a hot hand only if a player makes his previous shot and only within locations. Even making three shots in a row has no effect on making the next shot if a player moves locations. Our results suggest that any hot hand in basketball is only present in extremely similar shooting situations and likely not in the run-of-play.
The second paper at first glance seems to be one that would be of more general interest in addition to being interesting to sports economists. Its title is "Does Employing Skilled Immigrants Enhance Competitive Performance? Evidence from European Football Clubs" by Britta Glennon, Francisco Morales, Seth Carnahan, and Exequiel Hernandez. Here's the link. Here's the abstract.
We investigate the effect of hiring skilled immigrant employees on the performance of organizations. This relationship has been difficult to establish in prior work due to theoretical ambiguity, limited data, and inherent endogeneity. We overcome these difficulties by studying European football (soccer) clubs during 1990-2020. Detailed microdata from this setting offers unusual transparency on the migration and hiring of talent and their contribution to collective performance. Further, the industry is characterized by country-level rule changes that govern the number of immigrant players clubs can hire. Using these rule changes as the basis for instrumental variables, we find a positive local average treatment effect of the number of immigrant players on the club’s in-game performance. To examine the theoretical mechanisms, we explore whether immigrants cause superior performance because they are more talented than natives or because they enhance the national diversity of their clubs. We find strong evidence for the talent mechanism. We find contingent evidence for the national diversity mechanism: national diversity has a positive relationship with club performance only when the club employs an immigrant manager (coach). The presence of an immigrant manager also strengthens the positive relationship between the number of immigrant players and club performance.
Just a quick point regarding the last three sentences of the second abstract. Perhaps their finding can be explained by immigrant managers being able to get marginally more productivity from immigrant players, meaning this is really just about teams getting the most productivity out of their talent and not diversity per-se.