Identifying the Value of Teamwork: Application to Professional Tennis

Abstract： 

Do workers vary in their ability to work with others? I compare a given worker's productivity in solitary production to their value-added to team production to identify team skills: a worker's contribution to team production above and beyond that given by general skills. The identifying assumption is that workers use general skills in both production functions, but team skills only in team production. Professional men's tennis provides a useful setting to compare solo work (singles) to teamwork (doubles), within worker. I find that around 50% of variation in team output is explained by team skills. This is robust to a variety of specifications, including nonlinearities in player inputs. Players sort positively-assortative along both skill dimensions, yielding indirect returns to skills of about half the magnitude of the direct returns.

Speaker Biography：

Prof. Devereux is an assistant professor at University College Dublin. He obtained his undergraduate degree from University of British Columbia and his Ph.D. from University of Toronto. He is an empirical economist with an interest in labor, health and education economics. As part of his appointment at University College Dublin, he spend half the year teaching in Beijing at the Beijing-Dublin International College of Beijing University of Technology.