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...

Recent theoretical research has identified many ways how contracts can be used as rent seeking devices vis-à-vis third parties, but there is no empirical evidence on this issue so far. To test some basic qualitative properties of this literature, we develop a theoretical and empirical framework...

This paper examines how professional female tennisplayers react to: i) prize incentives and ii) heterogeneity in ex ante players' abilities. It is found that a larger prize spread encourages women to increase effort, even when controlling for many tournament and player characteristics. Further...

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...

There are three main critical areas in the Italian football industry. First, we find that the revenues of teams playing in Serie A are low and highly concentrated on TV rights, hence vulnerable to changing conditions in the mass media industry. Second, we document that there has been an...

We estimate the relationship between international youth and professional tennis rankings. We find no difference between the predictiveness of rankings from age 14 & Under versus age 16 & Under competitions. The most persistent predictor of professional success is beating older top ranked...

One of the potential avenues for former professional football players to pursue their career is to become a head coach of a club’s first team. An important question is how to best prepare for such a reconversion. This letter is the first in the academic literature quantifying the association...

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...