Women’s sports have received much less attention from economists than from other social scientists. This Handbook fills that gap with a comprehensive economic analysis of women’s sports. It also analyzes how the behavior and treatment of female athletes reflect broad economic forces.

Prior work on long-term contracts and the incentive to shirk has focused almost exclusively on Major League Baseball. The current inquiry is the first to examine shirking in the National Basketball Association. We employed two different measures of player productivity. When the NBA's measure is...