Articles in this issue:

  • David J. Berri
    Michael A. Leeds
    Eva Marikova Leeds
    Michael Mondello

    The role of the manager in promoting production is a little-understood phenomenon. In particular, it is difficult to separate managers’ contributions from the abilities of the workers they supervise. Firms may therefore mistakenly attribute the contributions of the workers to the managers who happen to oversee them. With its plethora of performance data, the National Basketball Association (NBA) provides a natural setting to measure the contribution of a head coach to the performance of his team. We find that some highly regarded coaches deserve their accolades, but several coaches owe...Read more

  • Brad R. Humphreys
    Jane E. Ruseski

    We examine the dimensions of the sports market in the United States.We investigate sports participation, sports viewing, and the supply and demand sides of the sports market. Our estimates of the value of economic activity in the sports market rang from $44 to $60 billion in 2005. The 49,169 firms in the industry employed just over one million workers. About 118 million people participated regularly in sports in 2005, and more than 277 million individuals attended spectator sporting events.Read more

  • Stephen Shmanske

    This paper compares two methods of examining the entry choice of professional golfers, focusing on the size of the purse, the strength of the competition, and a newly constructed variable, the match of the player’s skills with the skills rewarded at each tournament, while controlling for some dynamic factors such as year end pushes to cross relative earnings thresholds. Logit regressions are one method of examining the entry choice. A second method exploits combinatorial arithmetic. Choosing which n of N tournaments to play is equivalent to choosing n balls without replacement from an urn...Read more

  • Wen-Jhan Jane
    Gee San
    Yi-Pey Ou

    This paper provides a comprehensive study of the causality between pay and performance for professional sports teams. By using the total salary payment, as well as the dispersion of salary payment of the baseball teams in Taiwan, we engage in a simultaneous regression of a Granger Causality Test for each team’s salary structures and their corresponding performance. Our empirical results show that the causality only runs from the dispersion of salary payment to team performance, and not vice versa. As such, both the tournament hypothesis, which emphasizes the effect of salary dispersion,...Read more

  • Marvin Washington

    The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the most dominant institution organizing collegiate and amateur athletics in the United States and potentially the world. The NCAA, founded in 1906, is composed of more than 1,000 schools, organizes competition for 40 sports, and coordinates the athletic competitions of more than 90 championships. As the commercial shown during the men’s Division I postseason basketball tournament (March Madness) states, the NCAA organizes competitions for more than 300,000 student athletes, most of which will be going pro in something other than...Read more