Intercollegiate amateur athletics in the US largely bars student-athletes from sharing in any of the profits generated by their participation, which creates substantial economic rents for universities. These rents are primarily generated by men's football and men's basketball programs. We...

Economic models predict that “superstar” players generate externalities that increase attendance and other revenue sources beyond their individual contributions to team success. We investigate the effect of superstar players on individual game attendance at National Basketball Association...

The value of star college basketball players to their schools is examined using information known during the recruiting process (i.e., ex ante marginal revenue product). Under various regression models, five-star basketball players (those in the top few percent of college basketball players) are...

During the early days of professional baseball, the dominant major leagues imposed a “reserve clause” designed to limit player wages by restricting competition for labor. Entry into the market by rival leagues challenged the incumbent monopsony cartel's ability to restrict compensation....

Many count statistics are used to measure the productivity of hitters in Major League Baseball, such as the number of home runs and the number of runs batted in a season. However, comparing the talent of individual players across time is difficult as rules and technologies change. In this paper,...

In 1997 a review of the financial health of English county cricket highlighted strategic weaknesses within the professional game, principally an over-reliance by clubs on the annual grants provided to them by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB). Without such grants the teams, in general...

This study tests for racial discrimination against minority managers in Major League Baseball using financial-market imbalances as it relates to the wagering marketplace for the sport. Using detailed betting data on the percentage bet on the favorite from Sports Insights, we test for prejudice...

This study explores the forecasting of Major League Baseball game ticket sales and identifies important attendance predictors by means of random forests that are grown from classification and regression trees (CART) and conditional inference trees. Unlike previous studies that predict sport...

This paper examines the growing trend of NFL players to forego participation in the league's yearly All-Star Game, the Pro Bowl. Viewership of the Pro Bowl has been substantially lower than the average game day in recent years, causing controversial discussions about the viability of the game...

Using principal components analysis (PCA) and hierarchal clustering, I classify all professional basketball players in the NBA since the 2000-01 season and observe their classification transitions under a Markov transition matrix framework. Player attributes—including shot type and location...