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🚨Working Paper Alert🚨 "QB or Not QB? Measuring Discrimination in Football Labor Markets" TL;DR I find that there is significant discrimination when recruiting QBs from HS to college (and from college to the NFL!) based on their race.. and this costs teams wins🏆 and money💰 1/n

To assess whether there's actual discrimination, I use a benchmark and an outcome test. The 1st one shows diff in recruitment rates conditional on other vars. The 2nd one shows diff in performance by race. Gaebler & Goel (2024) show that under a monotonicity assumption, at least one test is right!

Ok, non-white QBs are less likely to be recruited.. so what? Maybe they are worse? Not according to the data 📊 They have diff play styles (e.g. pocket passers vs dual threats), but QBs of color still tend to outperform white QBs in relevant measures 4/n

Ok, but it could be that recruiters are trying to maximize the performance of _the team_.. so they track non-white QBs to other positions (most likely, a wide receiver (WR)). However, it doesn't appear like HS Top QBs are better WR than... WRs. In fact, it appears like they are worse 5/n

If some teams discriminate, how much does that cost them? I do some sims under a scenario where teams randomly choose a QB with a similar HS performance to the one I observe. Teams that are more likely to discriminate would increase their prob of winning significantly if they didn't (6.5%) 6/n