Showing Visibility When it Matters: Contingent Employment and Effort

We examine contingent employment arrangements, assuming that agents perceive them as exceptional opportunities to signal their capabilities to the labor market. We study a multitask career-concerns model in which employment contingency shifts effort toward highly visible tasks at the expense of less visible ones. Exploiting a distinct setting of contingent employment in professional soccer, we test this effort-visibility hypothesis via entropy balancing. Consistent with the model, we observe that agents reallocate effort toward more visible actions while reducing effort in more subtle actions.

Link to paper tbd

Recommended citation: Froch, Jonas; Gürtler, Oliver; Sage, Felix (2026): "Showing Visibility When it Matters: Contingent Employment and Effort"; Working Paper