This article illustrates the difficulty of replicating results in the area of sports economics. This article gives three different examples that seem straightforward, but are actually quite difficult to replicate. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that the discrepancies are not due to human...

The research of sports economists often addresses issues of interest to nonacademics. The shared interests often lead to interactions that have benefits and costs. The benefits center on nonacademic research—found in the ‘‘sabermetric’’ and...

Previous evidence on the validity of the compensating differences theory has been ambiguous. This is mainly attributed to that, in most contexts, important components of worker skills are unobserved, leading to biased estimates of compensating differences. This article uses data on professional...

The effect of income and performance on quit behavior is analyzed for professional tennis players. By means of players’ data from the 1985 season until the 2007 season of the ATP-Tour, a stratified Cox regression shows that a higher annual prize money and better performance (measured for...

Allegations of selection bias toward the major conferences and teams with committee representation have previously been levied on the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Basketball tournament selection committee. We illustrate the source of this bias is political correctness. When...

Assessing the effect of the timing and sequencing of various policy regimes on optimizing agent behavior is both important and difficult. To offer some insights, this article examines a timing decision from sports. The penalty shootout in football (soccer) has long been seen as problematic,...

Rottenberg’s “The Baseball Players’ Labor Market†holds the original ideas behind many threads of the sports economics literature. Most well known, the article contains both the invariance proposition (IP) and the uncertainty-of-outcome hypothesis. But there is also a...

This article tests for the existence of two types of selection biases in sports markets. First, the better-educated players and players of higher socioeconomic background have better outside opportunities. If they decide to follow a professional soccer career, they must be truly good to...

Many countries compete fiercely for the right to host mega-events like the World Cup. Proponents of hosting mega-events claim that yields economic gains. Many available studies focus on partial effects of hosting or concern ex post analyses. The authors utilize the existing literature to perform...

This article reexamines the calculation of the relative standard deviation (RSD) measure of competitive balance in leagues in which draws are possible outcomes. Some key conclusions emerging from the exchange between Cain and Haddock and Fort are reversed. There is no difference, for any given...