By Robbie Butler
We are delighted to announce we have recently been published in Kyklos. Our paper - "The Baby Club: Paternity and Performance in a High-Pressure Setting" - attempts to understand worker performance before and after the birth of a child. Specifically, we look at male footballers and try to assess how child birth effects their performance on the pitch.
Our paper offers new insights into fatherhood by asking if the onset of paternity changes workplace productivity. We do this in the well-monitored and high-pressure setting of professional football using a novel dataset that matches 115 birth disclosures to the performance of 96 players.
Our empirical approach involves specifying a performance equation for a suite of match-level performance statistics and estimating OLS and Poisson fixed-effect panel regressions. We find a negative correlation between fatherhood and collaborative performance as measured by expected assists—a player's ability to create goalscoring opportunities. We also report negative effects for the perinatal period for expected assists and passing measures.
There is no evidence of performance changes resulting from expectancy news. As negative performance effects are observed in a context of ‘superstar wages’, this raises concerns for high-pressure labour markets where workers are remunerated less but have low uptake of leave entitlements or where paternity leave is culturally taboo.
The full paper, available in open access, can be found here.
We are delighted to announce we have recently been published in Kyklos. Our paper - "The Baby Club: Paternity and Performance in a High-Pressure Setting" - attempts to understand worker performance before and after the birth of a child. Specifically, we look at male footballers and try to assess how child birth effects their performance on the pitch.
Our paper offers new insights into fatherhood by asking if the onset of paternity changes workplace productivity. We do this in the well-monitored and high-pressure setting of professional football using a novel dataset that matches 115 birth disclosures to the performance of 96 players.
Our empirical approach involves specifying a performance equation for a suite of match-level performance statistics and estimating OLS and Poisson fixed-effect panel regressions. We find a negative correlation between fatherhood and collaborative performance as measured by expected assists—a player's ability to create goalscoring opportunities. We also report negative effects for the perinatal period for expected assists and passing measures.
There is no evidence of performance changes resulting from expectancy news. As negative performance effects are observed in a context of ‘superstar wages’, this raises concerns for high-pressure labour markets where workers are remunerated less but have low uptake of leave entitlements or where paternity leave is culturally taboo.
The full paper, available in open access, can be found here.
RSS Feed
