This paper attempts to resolve some of the confusion in the sports economics literature regarding conjectures, open and closed leagues, and the invariance principle in sports league modeling. Very few papers model talent level and talent investment by teams separately, which can create confusion...

Past work on principal-agent problems in sports does not effectively compare among players. The comparison must be made between players nearing contract negotiations and other players to detect ex ante strategic behavior (turning up performance just prior to contract negotiations) and ex post...

A strong secondary market has emerged where National Football League (NFL) personal seat licenses (PSL) and season ticket rights (STR) are sold electronically. These data allow us to estimate determinants of market prices for long-run access to NFL attendance. The analysis finds that...

This article investigates the decision of high school athletes to pursue college educations or play professional sports immediately after high school. Using salary, draft, and playing data for Major League Baseball, along with minor league playing data, the authors estimate the lifetime earnings...

This article illustrates the difficulty of replicating results in the area of sports economics. This article gives three different examples that seem straightforward, but are actually quite difficult to replicate. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that the discrepancies are not due to human...

We address potential racial bias by Major League Baseball umpires with respect to ball–strike calls. We offer a number of econometric specifications to test the robustness of the results, adding the role of implicit and explicit monitoring as well as pitch location. Our analysis shows...

Rottenberg’s “The Baseball Players’ Labor Market†holds the original ideas behind many threads of the sports economics literature. Most well known, the article contains both the invariance proposition (IP) and the uncertainty-of-outcome hypothesis. But there is also a...

From historical odds Cain and Haddock assign the probability of a tie at 25% and offer functional forms for the standard deviation of a league with equal chances of a win for each team under different point assignment schemes. They then track the ratio of actual to these idealized standard...

If a sports time series, such as attendance, is nonstationary, then the use of level data (e.g., demand estimation using panel data) leads to biased estimates, and the direction of the bias is unknown. In past works, authors have failed to reject nonstationary data, taken first differences, and...