The National Football League (NFL) has recently received significant negative media attention surrounding the safety of its players, revolving largely around the long term health risks of playing the sport. Recent premature deaths and instances of suicide associated with chronic traumatic...

The National Football League (NFL) has recently received significant negative media attention surrounding the safety of its players, revolving largely around the long term health risks of playing the sport. Recent premature deaths and instances of suicide associated with chronic traumatic...

The rigorous economic analysis of peer group formation is a burgeoning subject. Much has been written about how peers in uence an individual's behavior, and these effects are quite prevalent. However, less has been written on how exactly these peer groups begin and the resulting consequences of...

This paper finds the effect of having friends of a similar race and who are involved in similar activities. It explores data which allows a peer group to be defined openly through self nominations. Using a strategy that corrects for the endogeneity of peer effects by instrumenting using...

The "Halo Effect" occurs when lotto ticket sales are unexpectedly high following a large jackpot. An examination of the Powerball lottery finds evidence that the halo effect exists and that it is the result of bettors exchanging prize winnings for new tickets.

Civic boosters generally have estimated the Super Bowl to have an impact of $300 to $400 million on a host city’s economy. The National Football League has used the promise of an economic windfall to convince skeptical cities that investments in new stadiums for their teams in exchange for the...

An empirical analysis of the economic impact of the Major League Baseball’s postseason on host-city economies from 1972-2001 suggests that any economic benefits from the playoff are small or non-existent. An examination of 129 playoff series finds that any increase ineconomic growth as a...

Previous research has concluded that the 1981 and 1994/95 Major League Baseball (MLB) strikes have caused short-term losses in attendance but have not resulted in any long-term effects on attendance. While total attendance at MLB games following the 1994/95 strike has recovered to its pre-strike...

Graduation rates for male athletes overall as well as men’s football and basketball players lag behind those of male non-athletes at Division I colleges and universities. Scholarship athletes, however, are much more likely to be drawn from racial and ethnic groups with lower average graduation...