The impact of health shocks on worker performance: Evidence from Major League Baseball

A small, recent, growing literature examines the impact of health shocks in the form of illness or disease, and interventions aimed at mitigating the impact of these health shocks, on labor market outcomes. These papers report evidence that labor market outcomes improve significantly following health shocks and interventions. We extend this analysis to a novel setting where a workplace injury represents the health shock and s surgical procedure to repair this injury represents the intervention. We employ matching methods to construct a counterfactual comparison group of uninjured Major League Baseball (MLB) pitchers and compare labor market outcome in this group to treated MLB pitchers who experienced ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) injuries and underwent a reconstructive ligament repair procedure. Surgical repair of UCL injuries extends post-injury MLB pitcher careers by roughly 1.3 seasons relative to matched uninjured pitchers, a 14.5% increase that generates substantial economic benefits for players and teams. Post-injury and treatment pitcher performance, in terms of batting success of hitters faced by treated pitchers, improves by roughly 8%.