Given its high level of regulation, the gambling industry must be able to react quickly to litigation and resulting change in policy (and enforcement thereof). Using a case study approach, this short paper highlights how the twin issues of policy and litigation have recently impacted the...

We show that precocity, as measured by the age of entry into the elite-level professional basketball labor pool, often leads to better career outcomes. Our findings cast doubt on the on-court efficacy of the National Basketball Association's contentious age eligibility rule.

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.

On June 30, 2012, a North American Association of Sports Economists-sponsored symposium session entitled “Sports Economics on Trial†was held in conjunction with the 2012 Western Economics Association International conference in San Francisco, California. The foci of the symposium were...

Given the vast number of observations in a transparent environment, the interaction between players and referees in the National Basketball Association (NBA) provides a real-world laboratory that allows for observation and testing of implicit height-based biases (the so-called “Napoleon...

This article shows that the first autocorrelation of basketball shot results is a highly biased and inconsistent estimator of the first autocorrelation of the <italic>ex ante</italic> probabilities with which the shots are made. Shot result autocorrelation is close to zero even when shot probability...

The authors analyze the effects of psychological pressure on performance using National Basketball Association (NBA) free throw data from the 2002-2003 through 2009-2010 seasons. The authors find evidence that players choke under pressure— they shoot on average 5-10 percentage points worse...

The recent nonexperimental literature on social learning focuses on showing that observational learning exists, that is, individuals do indeed draw inferences by observing the actions of others. We take this literature a step further by analyzing whether individuals are Bayesian social learners....