Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Ambidexterity Premium in Football


Alex Bryson, Bernd Frick and Rob Simmons: Wage returns to scarce talent: The case of professional football players:

The value of two-footedness

Two-footedness is the ability to use both feet to pass, tackle and shoot. Unsurprisingly, this versatility is strongly related to player performance. Furthermore, it is a fairly unusual talent – around one-sixth of the players in the top five European leagues are two-footed. Although it can be taught from an early age, it rarely occurs. This is changing. A football school was set up in the UK in 2004 claiming to be “the first and original soccer school that concentrates solely on improving the other foot”1. Nevertheless, this training of two-footedness is something that can only be properly developed at an early age in the formative years of a player’s career and is difficult to instil in today’s established professional players. Furthermore, a recent study of amateur and professional players found a “surprising absence of plasticity in foot use, given the importance of learning, experience, and culture in models of handedness and footedness” (Carey et al., 2009). Hence, we can treat footedness as a pre-determined specialist ability that is capable of generating a return.

Does this talent translate into wages? The answer is “yes”. [...]

2 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    Human genone mapping: Scientist question CSIR claim
    Read more at www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sci-tech/human-genome-mapping-scientists-question-claim_100288051.html

  2. Anonymous said...

    Hi,

    I saw this link on the IISc website which tells about lecturer position?

    http://www.iisc.ernet.in/content_facultyinfohowtoapply.html

    Does this mean that IISc will also entertain applications from fresh Ph.Ds for the post of lecturers? Can you also throw some light on the advantages and disadvantages of applying to the lecturer position (compared to AP after post doc) as a fresh Ph.D only with respect to IISc? Is it a realistic possibility now for a fresh Ph.D to enter IISc as a lecturer?