C. Jill Stowe

Breeding to sell: a hedonic price analysis of leading Thoroughbred sire stud fees

This article utilizes panel data on leading Thoroughbred sires from 1999 until 2008 and estimates the determinants of their stud fees, or the price paid for the rights to one breeding season, and the marginal value of those characteristics. Using a Fixed Effects (FE) estimation procedure, we find strong evidence of ‘breeding to sell’: stud fees for established sires are determined primarily by the sales prices of their progeny. Other determinants include a sires ability to produce sons who go on to become sires themselves, current year progeny racing performance and cumulative racing performance of a sires progeny.

Ready to run: price determinants of thoroughbreds from 2 year olds in training sales

ABSTRACT This article utilizes data from the complete set of U.S. thoroughbred 2-year-old in-training sales held in 2013 and estimates the determinants of prices for 1806 two-year-old thoroughbreds. The results reveal that the time in which these prospective racehorses run a standardized distance is the most statistically significant determinant of market price. Other individual horse characteristics, pedigree quality variables and sale quality are also found to be price determinants. An additional result of interest is the significant premium buyers are willing to pay for horses by sires of unknown quality.

Is Moneyball Relevant on the Racetrack? A New Approach to Evaluating Future Racehorses:

The market for racehorses is volatile and inefficient, and the ability to identify and exploit undervalued characteristics which predict performance can be profitable. In this article, we evaluate whether quantitative measures of physical structure and movement can help predict racing success and whether these measures are appropriately valued by the market. We discover an interesting dynamic: One measure predicting late racing development is a significant predictor of career earnings but is not valued by the auction market; a different measure predicting early racing development is valued by the marketplace but does not predict career earnings.

Risk and Discrimination

In the traditional Becker model of employer discrimination, discriminatory behavior arises from a utility-maximizing owner who balances firm profits against the disutility of hiring workers from the disadvantaged demographic group. However, in the modern firm, many human resource decisions are made by agents of the owner (i.e., managers) whose actions do not necessarily reflect the preferences of even profit-maximizing owners. In this paper, we present a principal-agent model of discrimination with a profit-maximizing principal (owner) and a gender-discriminating agent (management). We show that managerial discrimination is increasing with the degree of risk in the revenue-generating process. We then test this relationship using a Colombian plant-level dataset and show that, consistent with our model, the female share of the labor force is decreasing in various measures of both industry-level and plant-level volatility.