Beschreibung:
We analyze the effect of the coach's gender on risk-taking in women's National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball teams. We find that the coach's gender has a sizable and significant effect on the team's risk-taking, a finding that is robust to several empirical strategies, including an instrumental variable approach. We find that women's teams with a male head coach are 5 percentage points more likely to take risk than women's teams with a female head coach. This gap is persistent over the duration of games and does not change with intermediate game performance. Since risk-taking has a positive effect on winning a game, female head coaches could improve their team's success by adopting more risk-taking.