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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!

To keep things short, there is a significant diff in recruitment (for both the transition to college and to the NFL), which is probably not surprising to anyone that has watched football. One interesting thing is that for HS recruitment, there results are moderately robust to hidden bias 🤓 3/n

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

But why is this important? Measuring discrimination in labor markets is not easy, especially because a lot of the times we lack data (on recruitment, performance, etc.). Sports labor markets have the advantage of having *a lot* of data... and who doesn't like that? 7/n

This application allows us to look at the recruitment process at different stages, and to have objective measures of performance throughout a players' career. And in this case, it could be that early decisions (HS) could compound disparities later on as well (NFL). Anyways, this was fun! 8/8