Exit Discrimination and its Effect on Career Earnings : An Event History Analysis of Career Longevity in the NBA

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, it is a complement to the many wage discrimination studies by examining exit discrimination in the NBA using a decade's worth of data (the 1980's). White players have a 36% lower risk of being cut than black players, ceteris paribus, translating into an expected career length of 7 seasons for an apparently similar player who is white, and 5.5 seasons for the same player who is black. Second, the career earnings effect of exit discrimination in the 1980's is larger ($577,000) than the career earnings effect of wage discrimination ($329,000). Third, consistent with much of the previous literature, customer racial discrimination appears to explain more of the observed exit discrimination than employer discrimination