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Farnell, Alex, Mills, Brian, O’Sullivan, Vincent, Simmons, Robert and Berri, David (2025) The effect of task switching on productivity: evidence from major league baseball pitchers. Oxford Economic Papers. ISSN 0030-7653
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Abstract
There are few opportunities, outside of a laboratory setting, to study how workers respond to the demands of task switching. A priori, task switching might either harm or benefit productivity, and thus it becomes an empirical question. Faced with difficulties in the measurement of productivity and task switching, we turn to an industry that produces accurate, detailed, and comparable measures of worker production, namely starting pitchers in Major League Baseball. Our results suggest that task switching, between pitching and batting, can improve subsequent pitching performance, though heterogeneity in this effect is present. We discuss implications for wider labour market settings.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | labour productivity; task switching; baseball; coarsened exact matching; |
| Academic Unit: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics, Finance and Accounting |
| Item ID: | 19643 |
| Identification Number: | 10.1093/oep/gpaf004 |
| Depositing User: | Dr Alexander Farnell |
| Date Deposited: | 03 Apr 2025 15:31 |
| Journal or Publication Title: | Oxford Economic Papers |
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Related URLs: | |
| URI: | https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/19643 |
| Use Licence: | This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here |
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