Contingent Employment and Effort: Lessons from Soccer
Published in , 2025
We study contingent employment relationships, assuming that agents understand it as a chance to show their capabilities to the labor market. We introduce contingent employment into a multitask career-concerns model and show that the contingency of employment incentivizes agents to focus their efforts on highly visible tasks. Using loan transfers in professional soccer as a proxy, we test this effort-visibility hypothesis via an entropy balancing approach. We find support for our hypothesis in that loan players increase their effort in conspicuous actions, such as shots on target and duels, while reducing effort in more subtle actions, such as passes.