Contingent Employment and Effort: Lessons from Soccer
Published in , 2025
The contingency of an employment arrangement may incentivize agents to elicit structural behavioral responses driven by career concerns. We develop a dynamic multitasking model predicting that contingent employment strengthens incentives to exert effort, especially in 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 and ball retention. While we find no significant impact on team performance, the observed behavioral pattern may carry broader implications in the field.