The city beautiful movement, which in the early 20th Century advocated city beautification as a way to improve the living conditions and civic virtues of the urban dweller, had languished by the Great Depression. Today, new urban economic theory and policymakers are coming to see the provision...

Using a sample of professional baseball players from 1871-2007, this paper aims at analyzing a longstanding empirical observation that married men earn significantly more than their single counterparts holding all else equal (the "marriage premium"). Baseball is a unique case study because it...

After three years in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), collegiate football players face a trade-off between spending more time in the NCAA and pursuing a career in the National Football League (NFL) by declaring for the draft. We analyze the starting salaries and signing...

The financial troubles of professional athletes are an ongoing topic of intrigue. In general, the zealousness brought to private equity schemes are a common factor in observed financial insolvency. Considering the behavioral attribute of self-confidence I propose a simple model which explains...

The establishment of the free agency system in the 1970s resulted in large salary increases among professional baseball players. Historical data show that players have tended to perform better at early stages of their careers since free agency was introduced. Under the current salary bargaining...

The traditional Becker/Arrow style model of discrimination depicts majority and minority and workers as perfectly substitutable inputs, implying that all workers have the same job assignment. The model is only appropriate for determining whether pay differences between, for example, whites and...

The traditional model of taste discrimination in labor markets presumes perfect substitution, making it unsuitable for the measurement of discrimination across job assignments. We extend the model to explain cross-assignment discrimination and test it on data from Major League Baseball. A...

We explore how umpires' racial/ethnic preferences are expressed in their evaluation of Major League Baseball pitchers. Controlling for umpire, pitcher, batter and catcher fixed effects and many other factors, strikes are more likely to be called if the umpire and pitcher match race/ethnicity....

This Chapter reviews evidence on discrimination in basketball, primarily examining studies on race but with some discussion of gender as well. I focus on discrimination in pay, hiring, and retention against black NBA players and coaches and pay disparities by gender among college coaches. There...