The “Hot Hand†hypothesis in gambling markets—belief that teams on winning streaks will continue winning—appears to exist in the National Basketball Association (NBA), but not the National Football League (NFL). Past research assumed that bookmakers set point spreads to...

An empirical examination of the determinants of real per capita income in cities with professional sports teams from 1969 to 1997 shows that postseason appearances are not associated with any change in the level of real per capita income in these cities. However, in the city that is home to the...

The most commonly used measures of competitive balance in sports leagues do not capture season-to-season changes in relative standings. This article describes an alternative measure of competitive balance, the Competitive Balance Ratio (CBR), that reflects team specific variation in winning...

Conventional wisdom holds that parity has increased in college football in recent decades due largely to limits on the number of scholarships teams can offer. The authors find that competitive balance has not increased in college football since the end of World War II, and they find mixed...

This article examines the earnings gap between male and female National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) head basketball coaches. Within women's basketball, female head coaches earn base salaries 9% higher than males. Estimates from a human capital earnings model suggest that differences...

Estimating the size of the sport industry is an important exercise. Unlike other industries, the sport industry extends across the usual classifications of economic activity included in national income and product accounts (NIPAs) and includes mass participation in sport and watching, listening,...

Taylor and Trogdon found evidence of shirking under some, but not all, draft lottery systems used in three different National Basketball Association (NBA) seasons. The authors use data from all NBA games played from 1977 to 2007 and a fixed effects model to control for unobservable team and...

We analyze the relationship between attendance, outcome uncertainty, and team quality in the National Hockey League (NHL). Based on the results from a reduced form model of attendance at 6,054 regular season NHL games from 2005-2006 to 2009-2010, we find evidence that attendance increases when...