Progressive Revenue Sharing in MLB: The Effect on Player Transfers

The 1997 collective bargaining agreement between the Major League Baseball owners and players’ union altered MLB’s system of sharing revenue sharing between clubs. The new system, a convoluted cross-subsidization scheme, by design progressively redistributed income from the highest revenue generating clubs toward the lowest revenue-producing clubs. The 2003 agreement extended this method of revenue redistribution, but with an increased the tax rate and modified process. The purpose of the revenue sharing system was to alleviate a growing disparity in revenue generation, which MLB claimed caused competitive imbalance. We examine progressive revenue sharing theoretically, within the principal-agent framework, and shows that the incentive to divest in talent is increased for lower revenue producing clubs. Empirical results are supportive. Payroll disparity and competitive imbalance increased modestly from the period immediately preceding implementation. Most striking however is the alteration in transfer rates of players, in particular the increased flow of productive talent away from the lowest revenue clubs. We show conclusively that low revenue producing clubs acted on the increased incentives to divest in talent.Sport, revenue redistribution, collective bargaining

First Nesting Record and Status Review of the Glossy Ibis in Nebraska

Glossy Ibis (Plegadis falcinellus) is believed to be a recent colonist from the Old World whose numbers have increased and range has expanded in North America over the past two centuries (Patten and Lasley 2000). Glossy Ibis range expansion has been described as involving periods of relative stability followed by periods of rapid increase (Patten and Lasley 2000). Prior to the 1980s, Glossy Ibis were primarily found in the southeastern United States and along the Atlantic Coast (Patten and Lasley 2000). In the mid to late 1980s, Glossy Ibis began to rapidly increase and expand into Texas. By the early 1990s they were increasingly reported in the Great Plains (Thompson et a1. 20 11), particularly along the front range of Colorado and New Mexico (Patten and Lasley 2000). In Nebraska, the first documented occurrence of Glossy Ibis was a single adult with 28 White-faced Ibis (Plegadis chihi) at Wilkins Waterfowl Production Area (WPA), Fillmore County, 24 April 1999 (Jorgensen 2001). Since the initial record, the number of reports of Glossy Ibis has increased. Glossy Ibis status was elevated from accidental to casual by the Nebraska Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee (NOURC) in 2005 (Brogie 2005). Only a few years later in 2014, its status was elevated again from casual to regular and NOURC no longer sought documentation for sightings (Brogie 2014). In 2015, Jorgensen observed this species nesting in the Rainwater Basin. Given the recent observation of nesting, the rapid increase in annual observations, along with field identification challenges as a result of similarity to and hybridization with the White-faced Ibis, the status of the Glossy Ibis in Nebraska is in need of clarification. Here, we provide observational details about the first confirmed nesting by the species in Nebraska, review all reports of Glossy Ibis and apparent Glossy × White-faced Ibis hybrids, and comment on this species’ overall status in the state

Optimal land cover mapping and change analysis in northeastern oregon using landsat imagery.

Abstract The necessity for the development of repeatable, efficient, and accurate monitoring of land cover change is paramount to successful management of our planet’s natural resources. This study evaluated a number of remote sensing methods for classifying land cover and land cover change throughout a two-county area in northeastern Oregon (1986 to 2011). In the past three decades, this region has seen significant changes in forest management that have affected land use and land cover. This study employed an accuracy assessment-based empirical approach to test the optimality of a number of advanced digital image processing techniques that have recently emerged in the field of remote sensing. The accuracies are assessed using traditional error matrices, calculated using reference data obtained in the field. We found that, for single-time land cover classification, Bayes pixel-based classification using samples created with scale and shape segmentation parameters of 8 and 0.3, respectively, resulted in the highest overall accuracy. For land cover change detection, using Landsat-5 TM band 7 with a change threshold of 1.75 standard deviations resulted in the highest accuracy for forest harvesting and regeneration mapping