The NBA, Exit Discrimination, and Career Earnings

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, it complements 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 percent lower risk of being cut than black players, ceteris paribus, translating into an expected career length of 7.5 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 ($808,000) than the career earnings effect of wage discrimination ($329,000). Third, our data are consistent with the hypothesis that customer racial discrimination is the reason for the observed exit discrimination