The Cost of Discrimination: A Study of Major League Baseball

This article seeks to determine whether discriminators perform differently than nondiscriminators, whether that performance difference serves to inhibit discrimination, and, if so, how the process works. It investigates an area with abundant data on both the racial mix of participants and firm performance—major league baseball. A sizeable and statistically significant relationship between winning and the presence of black players in the starting lineup is found to hold for the early years of the 1950s and to decline, as expected, as the average number of black ballplayers on major league rosters increased. However, a puzzle emerges in the fact that a significantly slower rate of integration was pursued in the American League (AL) than in the National League (NL) despite there being nearly identical associations between black players and winning in each. The most likely solution to that puzzle is that fan preferences differed—each black player on an AL team appears to have reduced attendance by significantly more than he would have on a NL team. Examination also reveals that when substitute players are considered separately, the positive association between the number of blacks employed and winning is much weaker, whereas the negative association between black ballplayers and attendance is the same. Not coincidentally, black players made up a significantly smaller proportion of substitutes than they did of starters throughout the entire period.     

Managers,specific human capital,and firm productivity in major league baseball

Recent research on the role of managers in firms concentrates on the relationship between compensation and individual performance, which links managerial skills and firm production only indirectly. In this paper, two related analyses test this link directly by examining how the experience of major league baseball managers affects both team and individual player performance. Grouped-data probit estimates indicate that, with team skills held constant, the probability of winning depends on the baseball-specific human capital of the manager. Further estimates, using the first-stage managerial attributes, also indicate that individual player performance improves when traded to "better-trained" managers.     

Determinants of Attendance in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League: Role of Winning,Scoring, and Fighting

Attendance in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League was studied for the 2009 to 2010 season. This junior league, part of the Canadian Hockey League system, serves as a development league for teenage players who attempt to parlay their participation in this league into a professional career. Fan demand for this level of hockey is found to be sensitive to the success of the home team and to exhibit normal consumer responses to weekday and monthly effects with weekends being more popular and attendance increasing throughout the season toward the playoffs. On-ice factors such as scoring, a proxy for excitement, and fighting are not shown to have a significant effect on attendance.     

The Rise (and Fall) of the Arena Football League

After 22 seasons of competition, the Arena Football League (AFL) suspended operations in 2009. Play resumed in 2010, but attendance has declined dramatically. We examine the determinants of the demand for tickets to AFL games using data from the league’s first incarnation from 1987 to 2008; we find that the honeymoon effect for first-generation AFL teams was very short. Teams lost about 1,700 fans per game on average in their second year of operation, a sizeable loss given league average of 11,000 fans. Our results also suggest that Major League Baseball (MLB) serves as a direct competitor to the AFL, and this offers insights into why the AFL has struggled in its second incarnation (2010–2012).     

我国足球产业与市场消费的关系分析

我国足球产业包含国家队足球产业、甲级联赛产业、甲A和甲B联赛产业、足协杯赛产业、乙级联赛产业、女子成年足球联赛产业、各级男女青少年联赛产业和其他商业性足球产业等；足球消费增长宏观上主要受我国城市化程度较低、余暇时间不多和足球场地设疆不足三大因素的制约，提高足球消费水平必须提高足球产业产品质量和服务水平，并按足球消费的种类和特点有的放矢地培养忠实的足球消费群体。     

Freedom of Entry,Market Size,and Competitive Outcome: Evidence from English Soccer

A primary prediction of the theory of sports leagues is that teams with higher revenues will have higher league positions or winning percentages than teams with smaller revenues. Behind this prediction lies the key influence of market size, yet this has been underexplored in the empirical literature on sports leagues. This paper combines detailed census of population data with panel data on team performance for an open sports league, the English Football League, to test the hypothesis that market size matters for team performance. We find a particularly important role for population close to the team's location. The impact of local population is reduced but not eliminated when allowance is made for entry in the form of competition from neighboring clubs. We assess implications of these findings for both European and North American sports league structures.     

Stee-rike four! What's wrong with the business of baseball? edited by Daniel R. Marburger praeger press, 1997, 218 pp.

This is a review of a 14-article volume edited by Daniel R. Marburger. These articles examine such topics as collective bargaining, player salaries, antitrust issues, and the problems of and future prospects for baseball. Major league baseball is an unregulated monopolist whose plant (stadium) is government-subsidized and whose unionized workers (players) share the monopoly profit with management. This sharing has led to considerable labor strife including strikes and lockouts. The major issues discussed in the book include the competitive imbalance as a result of large differences in team revenues, the player salary cap, and revenue sharing. The principal conclusions of the book include the marginal economic impact and benefits of a team on a city and the need to permit low-revenue teams to migrate.     

The wages of sin: Employment and salary effects of violence in the national hockey league

This paper investigates the proposition that violence is a significant determinant of player salary and employment in the National Hockey League. The basic hypothesis is that teams are composed of two types of player: the skill player whose performance and reward depends on scoring and the like and the physical player who is rewarded for bringing violence to the game. Testing this hypothesis ultimately involves constructing a model of salary determination and testing for the joint equality of the coefficients of skill and physical players. The data consist of a sample of 388 players for the 1989–90 season. The major conclusion is that the coefficients of the estimated models are significantly different for skill and physical players, thus confirming the hypothesized distinction.     

Promotion Mechanisms on the PGA TOUR

The dynamics of screening talent and promoting an athlete to a major team sports league is not entirely different from that of a major individual sports league. While talent is assessed through mechanisms offering more or less observations, coaching decisions and team quality that can affect performance in team sports are generally not present in individual sports. Avoiding the possible distortions that can come from assessing athletic talent in team sports, this article examines the ability of two PGA TOUR promotion mechanisms—the Nationwide Tour and Qualifying School (Q‐school)—to predict success. As expected, the results suggest that more observations from the Nationwide Tour assessment mechanism provide more information about talent that can be used to better predict success on the PGA TOUR. But place of finish also matters, so promotion through the Nationwide Tour alone is not sufficient for a player to have the greatest chance for success.     

You’re Fired!: The Impact of Race on the Firing of Black Head Coaches in Major College Football

It is well known that the hiring rate of black head coaches in major college football is not representative of the number of student-athletes that are black. However, less obvious is the fact that black head coaches may be treated unfairly when decision-makers decide whether to retain or fire their institution’s current head coach. In this paper, I use a rich dataset of National Collegiate Athletic Associate football coaches from 1990 to 2012, containing measures of coaching performance and school expectations, as well as information on each coach’s race and whether he was fired or retained in each season. Using this data, I estimate a discrete-time hazard model of the probability that a head coach is fired, allowing the hazard rate of black head coaches and white head coaches to differ, and find that black head coaches are 5.28 percentage points more likely to be fired than their white counterparts. Additionally, I find that black head coaches are more likely to be fired in the initial 3 years of tenure, and again in their seventh and eighth years, but that the difference in the probability of release between black and white head coaches in the fourth through sixth years of tenure is small and statistically insignificant.     

Risk Aversion and Wages: Evidence from the Baseball Labor Market

We develop a bargaining model to assess how workers and employers might allocate wages inter-temporally in order to cope with risk. We then apply this model to 106 long-term contracts for major league baseball players’ services. Most of these agreements not only smooth employee compensation over time but suggest greater relative risk aversion for teams than players. Compared to the wages they might pay to retain these players on a succession of one-year contracts, teams often pay a premium on longer-term agreements to protect against market volatility and potential inability to replace a key player on the open market.     

Football transfer fee premiums and Europe's big five

This article studies the transfer market for international football players. Analyzing a sample of 5,760 player transfers over 14 years, we provide evidence that clubs in English football pay larger transfer fee premiums compared to clubs in the top leagues of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. While the popular press often mentions the English premiums, we empirically demonstrate both their existence and their causal source. Using annual data, we show that the dramatic increase in English premiums is causally linked to the 2012 television contracts the EPL signed with domestic and international broadcasters. These findings have policy implications for the clubs, players, and governing bodies of European football, as well as indirect consequences for export‐oriented football clubs.     

Temperature and outdoor productivity: Evidence from professional soccer players

We estimate the causal effects of ambient temperature on outdoor productivity, using the performance data of professional soccer players in the Chinese Super League (CSL) from 2014 to 2018. We exploit exogenous variation in the players’ exposure to temperature by matching it with hourly stadium temperature at the time of kick-off. We find that temperature has an inverted-U shaped relationship with players’ physical performance, and high temperature has a sizeable adverse impact on the cognitive performance. Our results are robust while considering alternative measures of productivity, potential avoidable behaviors, various playing styles, and possible climate adaptations. Furthermore, we focus on the economic consequences of reducing players’ productivity by investigating the adverse impacts of high-temperature exposure on social media attention and players’ human capital accumulation. Our findings suggest that the temperature profoundly impacts on the careers of outdoor workers both in the short- and long-term.     

Contract Options and Performance: The Case of Major League Baseball

Atlantic Economic Journal - This study looks to understand whether the inclusion of optional years on Major League Baseball player contracts impacts player performance. Contract options are a...     

Monopsony and competition: The impact of rival leagues on player salaries during the early days of baseball

During the early days of professional baseball, the dominant major leagues imposed a “reserve clause” designed to limit player wages by restricting competition for labor. Entry into the market by rival leagues challenged the incumbent monopsony cartel's ability to restrict compensation. Using a sample of player salaries from the first 40 years of the reserve clause (1880–1919), this study examines the impact of inter-league competition on player wages. This study finds a positive salary effect associated with rival league entry that is consistent with monopsony wage suppression, but the effect is stronger during the 20th century than the 19th century. Changes in levels of market saturation and minor-league competition may explain differences in the effects between the two eras.     

Stadiums and Scheduling: Measuring Deadweight Losses in the Victorian Football League, 1920–70

Over a 50 year period, Australian Rules football's major league, the Victorian Football League, did not always use its largest and best-equipped stadium for regular season games between its most popular teams or schedule those teams to play twice in a regular season. We calculate deadweight losses from the use of capital goods (stadiums) and effects of match scheduling in this professional sports league. Such analysis has not been attempted previously because of the absence of a counterfactual. The welfare losses were significant but not sufficient to threaten the survival of a distance-protected cartel.     

Salary Vs. marginal revenue product under monopsony and competition: The case of professional basketball

Summary and Conclusions A large percentage of sports fans and the general public consider professional athletes to be overpaid. Of course, given their unique skills and abilities, athletes' salaries are high compared to other vocations. The relevant concept of overpayment, however, is in relation to a player's worth to his team. The fan or observer who recognizes that high salaries may in fact reflect players' abilities and contributions to team success, both on the playing surface and at the bank, is probably in the minority. In this paper, it has been argued that the exploitation of athletes depends on the structure of the labor market in professional sports. Despite their high salaries, professional athletes have not always (and some still do not) enjoyed a privilege available to both fans and owners — the privilege of selling their skills to the highest bidder. Previous studies have concluded that restrictions on baseball players' mobility depressed their salaries belowMRP's, and that removal of these restrictions resulted in salaries reflecting a player's value to his team. In this paper, it has been found that the same phenomenon has occurred in basketball, with salaries rising to the level ofMRP when players were given virtually unlimited freedom to negotiate. In addition, no significant evidence of racial discrimination was found in the NBA. The labor market in professional basketball might thus serve as a role model for baseball and football.     

Sport as Business

There is both a popular and academic literature suggesting thatowners of sports teams do not profit maximize. The alternativeformulation entails either win or utility maximization, usuallysubject to a break-even constraint. Another line of economicanalysis holds that team owners do fundamentally profit maximizeor that profit maximization provides a useful benchmark againstwhich to assess actual performance. There has been some empiricalwork attempting to decipher the true objective function of teamowners. These results are inconclusive. Objective functions,however, remain important because they affect both owner behaviourand league performance. In practice, owners' objectives varyby team, league, and country and are strongly affected by howthe team relates to an owner's other assets. The next task formodelling the behaviour and performance of sports leagues isto take fuller account of the diversity of ownership objectiveswithin a given league.     

内蒙古生态脆弱区经济-社会-生态环境系统综合评价

以内蒙古生态脆弱区12盟市为研究对象,构建经济-社会-生态环境系统综合评价指标体系,基于熵值法确定权重,采用线性加权的方式测算2010—2019年12盟市综合得分。结果表明：内蒙古的整体现状是对经济的重视程度>生态环境>社会系统;12盟市经济发展差距较大,社会与生态环境系统相比之下差异较小;导致综合发展水平得分高低的因素不同,综合3个系统得分加总,2019年,综合发展较好的主要集中在鄂尔多斯市、呼伦贝尔市、包头市、呼和浩特市,发展一般的主要集中在赤峰、锡林郭勒盟、兴安盟、通辽市,发展落后的集中在巴彦淖尔市、阿拉善盟、乌兰察布市、乌海市。