Minor League Baseball attracts over 40 million fans a year. One potentially important attendance draw is the ability for a fan to see a future major league baseball star. Each year Baseball America, a leading industry publication, ranks 100 top prospects that have yet to play substantially in...

Like Major League Baseball (MLB), minor league baseball attendance may be influenced by the quality of the team. We use a data set encompassing all A, AA, and AAA minor league teams from 1992 to 2006 and find a positive relationship between a minor league team’s winning percentage and...

The unique nature of the PGA TOUR allows exempt players to have a large measure of discretion in the number of tournaments they enter in a given year. Recent policy changes on the PGA TOUR suggest that TOUR players may be responsive to exemption status and expected earnings. Using the previous...

The dynamics of screening talent and promoting an athlete to a major team sports league is not entirely different from that of a major individual sports league. While talent is assessed through mechanisms offering more or less observations, coaching decisions and team quality that can affect...

This paper develops and applies an integrated model of human mortality and morbidity valuation that is consistent with principles of welfare economics. The standard expected utility model of one person facing two health states (alive and dead) is extended to a setting in which two family members...

This paper analyzes the interstate distribution of awards made through the SmallBusiness Innovation Research (SBIR) Program operated by the U.S federalgovernment. The main finding is that awards tend to be made to firms in centersof innovative activity, where knowledge is most easily created and...

This article examines possible explanations for increased utilization of Powder River Basin (PRB) coal in electric power generation that occurred over the last two decades. Did more stringent environmental policy motivate electric power plants to switch to less polluting fuels? Or, did greater...