Legal Commentary

What a pleasure it is to have an empiricist on the faculty.  My colleague Fred Vars has co-authored a fair amount of work with Ian Ayres, and he appears to share Ayres's gene for hitting on interesting and surprising issues in an interesting and surprising way.

Exhibit A is his new working paper, Missing Well: Optimal Targeting of Soccer Shots.  Here's the abstract:

Soccer coaches give contradictory advice about where to aim the soccer ball when shooting on goal. This article proposes an answer to the question of where to aim by asking not how to score but rather how to miss. The answer is then put to the test by examining the performance of top goal scorers in Europe and nearly every player in Major League Soccer. Missing well turns out to be a pretty good predictor of scoring on a high percentage of shots. A postscript considers why David Beckham seems to follow a much different shooting strategy with a high degree of success.

It's short, fascinating, works with a nifty data set, and has pretty charts.  It is also as fun and refreshing as an ice cream on a summer day.  Download it while it's hot.  I should note that it should be of interest not only to ELS types and soccer fans, but to fans of a wide variety of sports.  However, ironically enough given where Fred teaches, it should be of no interest to fans of Alabama football, since -- this year at least -- we can't miss.