Research in the field of customer discrimination has received relatively little attention even if the theory of discrimination suggests that customer discrimination may exist in the long run whereas employer and employee discrimination may not. This paper examines customer discrimination...

Human capital comprises a substantial portion of global wealth, but equity claims to human capital are not publicly traded. I analyze ten transactions between April 2014 and July 2016 in which ten active players in the National Football League (NFL) sell equity claims to their future labor...

There may be no phrase used more in professional sports than “competitive balance.” League commissioners and commentators alike emphasize the importance to have parity among teams in a sport. They argue that for the long-term health and growth of a sport, fans must have the belief that...

We study the determinants of superstar wage effects, asking whether productivity or popularity-based explanations are more appropriate. We use longitudinal wage and performance data for workers (players) and firms (teams) from a particular market for sports talent: Major League Soccer (MLS) in...

Beautiful people earn more. Surprisingly, this premium is larger for men than for women and is independent of the degree of customer contact. Overlooked is the possibility that beauty can influence college admissions. We explore this academic contributor to the labor market beauty earnings...

Research question: According to behavioral economics, coaches may unconsciously bias from rational behavior, which in turn affects team performance. We analyze the influence of a particular coach behavioral bias, overconfidence, on a soccer team performance.Research methods: We use a sample of...

This study examines reasons for the declining share of revenue going to Major League Baseball players. Though the players' union and team owners have proposed competing explanations, the phenomenon has not received any rigorous academic study. Economic theories for the similar decline of labor's...

FFormal rules and social norms are both important components of sanctioning anti-social behavior. However, finding data to analyze how these dual enforcement measures reinforce each other and change over time can be difficult. To provide insights on the interplay between rules and norms we...

Despite their idiosyncrasies, motor and cognitive learning and endurance sports training have in common that they involve repeated practice. While considerable research has been devoted to the effect of practice on performance, little is known about optimal practice strategies. In this paper, we...

Intuition and sports knowledge suggest the most talented professional footballers play for the best teams, i.e. positive assortative matching based on productivity. We consider Major League Soccer between 2007 and 2017. We estimate a wage equation, finding that player and team fixed wage...