Coaching Team Production.

The actual function of managers is the subject of much debate. Using data on more than 3,000 male college basketball players, their coaches, and their skill levels, the authors find a positive and significant relation between the ability to replicate an individual coach's allocation of playing time across players and his winning percentage. The results do support the property rights paradigm: managers are the employees of workers; and more generally, sports data can be used to help understand related economic processes where quantifiable measures of inputs and outputs are more costly to obtain. Copyright 1989 by Oxford University Press.