This study points out that changes in the format of the playoffs in the National Basketball Association have had the effect of lengthening the championship series and reducing the variance in the length of the series. These are valuable goals for the organization because they provide higher...

This paper describes the problem specification searches pose for inference, presents the results of some simulations for purposes of illustration, and uses the bootstrapping procedure to give a better estimate of statistical significance than a standard t-test. The value of the illustrations of...

The present paper investigates whether popular measures of economic freedom used in regression analyses by development economists and others are one dimensional. Using the indices provided by the Fraser Institute, Heritage/Wall Street Journal, and Heritage and Freedom House, a principal...

Examines the relationship between the marginal tax rate and usage of professional tax return preparation.

This study extends prior research on referee bias and close bias in professional soccer by examining whether Major League Soccer (MLS) referees’ discretion over stoppage time (i.e., extra play beyond regulation) is influenced by end-of-regulation match scores and/or home field advantage. To do...

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Using the political-economic history of the development of telephony during the 1870s as a backdrop, this paper studies a two-player Tullock contest that includes both research effort (R&D) and legal effort (<i>i.e.</i>, rent-seeking effort). The two types of efforts complement each other and...

This study examines the political economy of women’s professional basketball in the United States, including both the American Basketball League (ABL) and the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). To do so, we employ the structure-conductperformance paradigm (hereafter SCP) from...

The current study examines the political economy of collegiate dating markets by employing institution-level data from the national colleges and universities included in U.S. News & World Report's Best Colleges 2012. This is a more comprehensive sample than has been used in previous studies and...

Microfinance institutions are important, particularly in developing countries, because they expand the frontier of financial intermediation by providing loans to those traditionally excluded from formal financial markets. This paper presents the first systematic statistical examination of the...