This paper develops a novel method to identify the causal contribution of managers to team performance. The method … requires repeated random assignment of managers to multiple teams and controls for individuals' skills. A good manager is … someone who consistently causes their team to produce more than the sum of their parts. Good managers have roughly twice the …

We study the impact of managers on the success of professional soccer teams using data from the German "Bundesliga". We … evaluate the performance impact of individual managers by estimating regression models that include both team and manager fixed … effects, where we are exploiting the high turnover of managers between teams to disentangle the managers' contributions. We …