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 employ black quarterbacks, a development that might suggest race is no longer relevant when it comes to the evaluation of signal callers in the NFL. To examine this contention, this paper explores the relationship between player salary, performance, and race at the quarterback position over the period 1995 to 2006. We find that blacks and whites play this position differently. Specifically, black quarterbacks are more likely to run with the football. This skill, though, is not compensated in the market. Consequently, there is evidence that blacks face an uncompensated entry barrier in this particular occupation

Does it pay to specialize? 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 or multi-tasking. 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 pronounced gains to specialization with substantial predicted differences in returns for alternative skills. Moreover, these differences vary across the salary distribution. In the top half of the salary distribution, especially, model simulations show that specialists in either particular skill generate higher marginal returns than versatile players.

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 employ black quarterbacks, a development that might suggest race is no longer relevant when it comes to the evaluation of signal callers in the NFL. To examine this contention, this paper explores the relationship between player salary, performance, and race at the quarterback position over the period 1995 to 2006. We find that blacks and whites play this position differently. Specifically, black quarterbacks are more likely to run with the football. This skill, though, is not compensated in the market. Consequently, there is evidence that blacks face an uncompensated entry barrier in this particular occupation.

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.

What does it mean to find the Face of the Franchise? Physical Attractiveness and the Evaluation of Athletic Performance

Previous research has shown how more attractive people reap more rewards in a variety of settings. We show that attractiveness as measured by facial symmetry leads to greater rewards in professional sports. National Football League quarterbacks who are more attractive are paid greater salaries and this premium persists after controlling for player performance.

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

Learning for predictions: Real-time reliability assessment of aerospace systems

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) aim to predict the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of a system and to allow a timely planning of replacement of components, limiting the need for corrective maintenance and the down time of equipment. A major challenge in system prognostics is the availability of accurate physics based representations of the grow rate of faults. Additionally, the analysis of data acquired during flight operations is traditionally time consuming and expensive. This work proposes a computational method to overcome these limitations through the dynamic adaptation of the state-space model of fault propagation to on-board observations of system’s health. Our approach aims at enabling real-time assessment of systems health and reliability through fast predictions of the Remaining Useful Life that account for uncertainty. The strategy combines physics-based knowledge of the system damage propagation rate, machine learning and real-time measurements of the health status to obtain an accurate estimate of the RUL of aerospace systems. The RUL prediction algorithm relies on a dynamical estimator filter, which allows to deal with nonlinear systems affected by uncertainties with unknown distribution. The proposed method integrates a dynamical model of the fault propagation, accounting for the current and past measured health conditions, the past time history of the operating conditions (such as input command, load, temperature, etc.), and the expected future operating conditions. The model leverages the knowledge collected through the record of past fault measurements, and dynamically adapts the prediction of the damage propagation by learning from the observed time history. The original method is demonstrated for the RUL prediction of an electromechanical actuator for aircraft flight controls. We observe that the strategy allows to refine rapid predictions of the RUL in fractions of seconds by progressively learning from on-board acquisitions

A review of simplified servovalve models for digital twins of electrohydraulic actuators

The development and detail design of complex electrohydraulic actuators for aircraft flight controls require the use of accurate, high fidelity fluid-dynamic simulations in order to predict the behaviour of the system within its whole operating envelope. However, those simulations are usually computationally expensive, and simplified models are useful for the preliminary design phases and real-time health monitoring. Within this context, this work presents a review of low fidelity models for the fluid-dynamic behaviour of an electrohydraulic servovalve. Those are intended to run in real time as digital twins of the physical system, in order to enable the execution of diagnostic and prognostic algorithms. The accuracy of the simulations is assessed by comparing their results against a detailed, physics-based high fidelity model, which computes the response of the equipment accounting for the pressure-flow characteristics across all the internal passageways of the valve