Compensation Discrimination for Wide Receivers: Applying Quantile Regression to the National Football League

Keefer's recent article in the Journal of Sports Economics (2013) finds evidence of wage discrimination in the National Football League (NFL) market for linebackers. We examine the market for NFL wide receivers using similar techniques as Keefer, though we explore only rookies rather than all current players and wide receivers rather than linebackers. While we would expect to find stronger evidence of discrimination in the rookie market, as rookies are captured sellers, we find no pervasive pattern of pay discrimination by race in this market

EFFECTS OF THE AIRLINE DEREGULATION ACT ON MARKET PERFORMANCE: PRICE, CAPACITY, AND PROFITS

This dissertation addresses three areas of market performance affected by the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978: price, capacity, and profits. Since other factors, such as a depressed economy and rising oil prices, also exerted an impact on these performance characteristics, it is necessary to design a test which will take into account such influences. Chapter One discusses the history of the airline industry. Government regulation of the industry was quite limited prior to 1938, which was mostly the provision of airmail subsidies. Then, forty years of detailed regulation of rates and entry was followed by a gradual relaxation of such controls, pursuant to the Airline Deregulation Act. Today, regulation has virtually ceased. Chapter Two reviews the literature on regulation during the enforcement period of the CAB. In general, these works concluded that restrictions on entry and regulation of fares elevated fares above competitive costs and induced airlines to nonprice competition. Chapter Three analyzes the effects of deregulation on fares, finding that the overall real fare level has declined since deregulation. Moreover, short-haul fares have tended to rise relative to long-haul fares, bringing the fare structure more in line with carrier\u27s cost. Chapter Four considers the effect of deregulation on capacity. Airlines have increased the number of seats in various aircraft. What is even more important, the carriers have utilized peak-load pricing techniques to improve their load factors. Chapter Five investigates the impact of deregulation on industry profits. Since regulation diverted carrier rivalry into cost-increasing service competition, deregulation should not have affected profits significantly, provided increased carrier efficiency was reflected in sufficiently lower airline fares. As expected, industry profits were not found to have been affected to any appreciable extent by deregulation. Chapter Six summarized the dissertation and offered some concluding observations. Deregulation appears to have contributed to improved market performance by channeling competition into efficiency-enhancing activities, and customers have benefitted by service-fare alternatives more in line with their preferences

Adverse selection, seller reputation and buyer insurance in online auctions for 1960s-era collectible baseball cards

We investigate the differences between Beckett book values and eBay auction prices using an original data set of 876 auctions for 30 baseball cards from the 1960s era. We find that cards of lower quality generally sell (on eBay) above book price, whereas cards of higher quality generally sell below book price. We find that both the presence of buyer insurance and the number of bids increase eBay prices relative to book values and that the seller's reputation and the number of bids increase the probability that the eBay price will be greater than the corresponding book value.

Low-cost cadmium zinc telluride radiation detectors based on electron-transport-only designs

The goal of this project was to utilize a novel device design to build a compact, high resolution, room temperature operated semiconductor gamma ray sensor. This sensor was constructed from a cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) crystal. It was able to both detect total radiation intensity and perform spectroscopy on the detected radiation. CZT detectors produced today have excellent electron charge carrier collection, but suffer from poor hole collection. For conventional gamma-ray spectrometers, both the electrons and holes must be collected with high efficiency to preserve energy resolution. The requirement to collect the hole carriers, which have relatively low lifetimes, limits the efficiency and performance of existing experimental devices. By implementing novel device designs such that the devices rely only on the electron signal for energy information, the sensitivity of the sensors for detecting radiation can be increased substantially. In this report the authors describe a project to develop a new type of electron-only CZT detector. They report on their successful efforts to design, implement and test these new radiation detectors. In addition to the design and construction of the sensors the authors also report, in considerable detail, on the electrical characteristics of the CZT crystals used to make their detectors

Detection of electron and hole traps in CdZnTe radiation detectors by thermoelectric emission spectroscopy and thermally stimulated conductivity

The electrical properties of CdZnTe radiation detectors are largely determined by electron and hole traps in this material. The traps, in addition to degrading the detector performance, can function as dopants and determine the resistivity of the material. Thermoelectric emission spectroscopy and thermally stimulated conductivity are used to detect these traps in a commercially available spectrometer-grade CdZnTe detector, and the electrical resistivity is measured as a function of temperature. A deep electron trap having an energy of 695 meV and cross section of 8 x 10{sup {minus}16}cm{sup 2} is detected and three hole traps having energies of 70 {+-} 20 meV, 105 {+-} 30 meV and 694 {+-} 162 meV are detected. A simple model based on these traps explains quantitatively all the data, including the electrical properties at room temperature and also their temperature dependence