Gains from specialization and free agency:the story from the gridiron

In the field of personnel economics, there are few opportunities to convincingly test for salary returns to specialization as against versatility. This paper performs such a test by modeling returns to performance measures associated with two different skills practiced by running backs in the National Football League. We find gains to both specialization and free agency with substantial predicted differences in returns for alternative skills. These differences vary across the salary distribution. In the top half of the salary distribution, model simulations show that specialists in either particular skill generate higher marginal returns than do versatile players

Mixing the princes and the paupers: Pay and performance in the National Basketball Association

We investigate how team and individual performances of players in the National Basketball Association respond to variations in intra-team pay inequality. By breaking down team dispersion into conditional and expected components, we find that expected pay dispersion has a positive effect on team and individual performance. We find that team and individual performances are essentially orthogonal to conditional pay inequality, counter to the hypotheses of fairness and cohesion proposed in the literature both for sports and general occupations. A change in collective bargaining regime in 1996 had little impact on either team or player productivity

Paying NCAA Athletes

Non

Race and the evaluation of signal callers in the national football league

Until recently, the position of quarterback in the National Football League (NFL) was not an option for Black athletes. Today, many teams use Black quarterbacks, a development that might suggest race is no longer relevant when it comes to the evaluation of signal callers in the NFL. By modeling quarterback performance and salary over 1995-2006, we find that Black quarterbacks are more likely to run with the football, yet this skill is not compensated in the market. Furthermore, we find evidence of performance-related salary discrimination against Black quarterbacks in the top half of the salary distribution