FiT Publishing

In this paper, we develop a modified salary scale for NBA rookies that adjusts player financial incentives to enter the draft early. Our proposed “ratcheting” salary schedule pays different salary amounts depending on draft pick and the number of years the player delayed entry to the draft to alter the financial incentives of declaring early. We analyze this proposed new salary scale using a put option analogy to determine early exercise boundary positions in which there is no value in the option to delay entry into the draft. The results show that under a ratchet salary system the...Read more

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