Elizabeth Gustafson

Who Pays for Minor League Training Costs

As an alternative to monopsonistic exploitation, the underpayment of players in major league baseball may be explained as the attempt by owners to recoup general training expenses. In this article, a method is proffered for estimating the ‘surplus’ extracted from those players restricted by the reserve clause, where this surplus is defined as the difference between what the player is actually paid and what he would have received if he were a free agent. These estimates are then used to examine how the surplus varies across players. The results suggest a number of interesting aspects of the recovery of minor league training costs, monopsony exploitation, and the distribution of the surplus across players. First, owners only extract a surplus from ‘apprentices’ (i.e., those young players who are ineligible for salary arbitration). Second, the largest surpluses are extracted from those who cost the least to train. In fact, the surplus generated by star apprentices is about twice that of mediocre apprentices. Finally, the results suggest that the surplus extracted from minority apprentices is 10–15% higher than that extracted from white apprentices.

A note on the structural stability of salary equations - major league baseball pitchers.

The salaries of major league baseball players is a common subject for analysis in the sports economics literature. Although hitters and pitchers represent two separate groups, each of these two groups of players is assumed to be homogeneous so that aggregation within each group is appropriate. However, there are always potential problems associated with aggregation. If there are important differences between starters, long relievers, and stoppers that relate to their pitching skills and/or to their function in the production of team wins, then aggregation may lead to inaccurate conclusions regarding the determinants of their earnings. In this article, the authors examine the issue of aggregating the pitching input. By comparing a collective earnings equation for all pitchers with separate earnings equations for each type of pitcher, the authors find that the structure of salary rewards differs significantly between the groups. As such, the authors conclude that it is not appropriate to aggregate pitchers when analyzing the determinants of salaries.

An empirical examination of government expenditures and the ex-ante crowding-out effect for the British economy

The conventional macroeconomic view that consumers make their consumption decisions without regard for goods provided by the government has been examined in the literature. Moreover, the line of research that questions this conventional view argues that this separation does not have a firm theoretical backing. If consumers take government expenditures into account when maximizing their utility functions then the effects of fiscal policy actions will tend to appear weaker than those suggested by most conventional analyses. The examination of this issue should therefore have far-reaching political as well as economic implications within the context of traditional fiscal policies. This paper will empirically examine the ex antecrowding-out effect of government expenditures upon private consumption expenditures for the British economy. An aggregate consumption function is derived and estimated in the context of a simultaneous equations model based on intertemporal consumption theory. The empirical results sho...