Strategic behaviours in a labour market with mobility-restricting contractual provisions: evidence from the National Hockey League
研究国家冰球联盟球员在固定期限合同末尾的表现变化，发现只有年轻且预期流动高但表现低的球员会战略性地提升表现，而年长球员则可能因欧洲联赛的吸引力而表现下滑。
Abstract We follow workers’ performance along an unbalanced panel dataset over multiple years and study how performance varies at the end of fixed-term contracts, in a labour market where some people face a mobility-restricting clause (i.e. a noncompete clause). Focusing on the labour market of the National Hockey League, we analyse players’ performance data and contracts with a fixed-effects estimator to address empirical limitations in previous studies. We find that, on average, National Hockey League players’ performance does not vary. However, our estimations detect substantially heterogeneous behaviours, depending on tenure, perceived expected performance, and mobility. Only younger players (i.e. restricted free agents) with high expected mobility but low expected performance tend to behave strategically and perform better. Differently, older players (i.e. unrestricted free agents) with high expected mobility tend to underperform, as the option of moving back to European tournaments is more appealing.