Abstract
This research examines the impact of manager turnover on firm performance using information from the Dutch soccer league in the period 1986–2004. The main advantage of using sports data is that both manager characteristics and decisions and firm outcomes are directly observable. Both difference-in-difference and 2SLS estimates suggest no statistically significant improvements in performance after manager turnover, whereas previous research based on publicly traded firm data has found positive but very small effects of manager turnover on performance. The estimates confirm previous research using soccer data. In addition, estimates suggest that manager quality does not seem to matter in predicting turnover. These estimates are compared and contrasted with studies using publicly traded firm data and studies using soccer data.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Gertjan van den Berg for providing excellent research assistance. I am also very grateful to Infostrada BV, and in particular to Wouter Smak, for access to and help with collecting the data on manager turnover and manager characteristics; and to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and theMaastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organizations (METEOR) for financial support. Finally, I wish to thank the two referees of this journal, Lex Borghans and Allard Bruinshoofd for providing very useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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ter Weel, B. Does Manager Turnover Improve Firm Performance? Evidence from Dutch Soccer, 1986–2004. De Economist 159, 279–303 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-010-9157-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10645-010-9157-y
Keywords
- Manager turnover
- Firm performance
- Economics of sports
JEL Classification
- J21
- J24
- J44