FiT Publishing

Using a panel study of universities, we find that football success, as measured either by an upset win or winning a national championship, increases applications and enrollment at a university. Surprisingly, we further find that losing an upset game also increases student enrollment numbers. When examining the academic quality of incoming students following one of these events, we encounter mixed results. Our findings indicate that winning a national champion-ship lowers the number of students enrolling at a school from the top 10%, and between the top 10% to top 25%, of their high school...Read more

The possibility that coaches, players, or referees might be involved in point shaving has been a subject of debate since Wolfers’s (2006) controversial finding that favorites in NCAA college basketball games fail to cover point spreads with disturbing frequency. We reconcile Wolfers’s finding with evidence provided by Borghesi (2008), Borghesi and Dare (2009), and others that heavy favorites are not, on average, less likely to cover the point spread. We find that the distribution of game outcomes is bimodal, with one peak on one side of the “no corruption” outcome and one peak on the other...Read more

The paper estimates the key determinants of compensation for head football coaches in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision (the former D-IA) during the years 2006- 2010. Coaching compensation is regressed on variables capturing a coach’s personal characteristics, productivity, and institutional characteristics. The results yield seven important explanatory variables. Four are coach specific: BCS ranking, recruiting success, lifetime winning percentage, and years of experience. The remaining three are institutional: football revenue, enrollment, and graduation rate. No estimate of a...Read more

We employed a methodology similar to Brown (1993, 1994) to estimate the marginal revenue generated by a top-flight NCAA Division I college hockey player. We added to the extant literature in two ways. First, the previous research focused on college basketball and football players. This is the first attempt to consider the case of college hockey players. Second, previous research has been conducted using relatively small, cross-sections of data. We employed a larger, panel dataset. Empirical results showed that top-flight college hockey players generate between $131,000 and $165,000 in...Read more

This paper provides an empirical analysis of attendance to Division I women’s collegiate basketball programs from 2000-2009. The evidence suggests that women’s basketball attendance is sensitive to many of the same variables known to influence attendance to men’s collegiate basketball, including current and recent team quality, recent post-season success, and school characteristics. We further investigate whether college football is a complement, a substitute, or an independent of women’s basketball on campus. Investigating complementarity is of practical importance as schools continue to...Read more

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

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

This paper analyzes the financial incentives for entities to self-impose punishments post-apprehension but before the enforcement body imposes punishment. We argue that violators punish themselves in order to affect the level and type of total punishment. Violators may be able to choose the punishment that minimizes lost revenue. The model includes an enforcing body whose objective is to be perceived as fair by the public. We consider the case of university self-sanctions for National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) violations to test our self-punishment model using data from...Read more

Many economists view the NCAA as a cartel in the market for college athletes. Financially, this cartel allows NCAA members to attract and retain college athletes for the price of a ¡°grant-in-aid¡± without competitively bidding for the labor services of student-athletes, greatly reducing operating costs relative to a competitive market for athletes. A functioning cartel must have both monitoring of the members and an enforcement mechanism to punish violators. We investigate the factors that explain observed periods of probation in NCAA Division I-A football over the period 1978-2005. From...Read more

Though most academic research on sports pricing finds that sports organizations price their tickets in the inelastic region of consumer demand, most events do not consist of several micro-events contested in different locations where the event participants are not known until days before the event occurs. The Division I Men’s College Basketball tournament offers a contrast to most sporting events because there are several micro-events occurring at different sites, and there is greater uncertainty regarding event quality because participating teams are unknown until just days before each...Read more