Hendrik Scholten
Christian Deutscher
and Jochen Mayer

This paper seeks to determine the financial costs of recent injuries and market expectations of players’ future attrition rates by investigating the impacts on free agent contract designs, as represented by the yearly salary and contract length. The empirical findings, derived from data about 698 free agent contracts in Major League Baseball between 2011 and 2018, indicate that injuries exert different impacts on salaries versus contract lengths. For example, free agents who recently injured an elbow or shoulder receive shorter contracts than those not injured in the previous season, but...Read more

David Butler
Dennis Coates

This research estimates the effect of specific player position on salary in Major League Soccer. We expand a mincer-style wage equation with indicators for precise roles as defined by the Football Manager™ simulation. Our salary data covers 1,174 salaries for the 2019 and 2020 seasons. We match this to 17 positions and consider generalist and specialist functions in wage determination. Estimating ordinary least squares and quantile regressions, we find that defensive salary penalties are incurred only by specific peripheral defensive and wing back positions. Premia exist for versatile,...Read more

Stacy L. Brook
Sarah Foster

Due to significant salary differences between male and female employees, NCAA institutions have been accused of gender compensation discrimination. However, we hypothesize that some of these compensation differences may be a result of market forces as opposed to overt discrimination. To test this hypothesis, we created a statistical model incorporating variables affecting NCAA school revenues and coaching performance, and use a linear regression to estimate the statistical impact each variable has on compensation. Our empirical findings do not find employer discrimination of NCAA...Read more