Kevin Mongeon

A methodology for identifying the impacted groups in referee discrimination studies

This article presents an empirical methodology that allows one to identify the group being discriminated against by sport referees. Reestimating Price and Wolfers (2010, PW) discrimination in foul-calling analysis with our methodology, we find evidence that only black players are discriminated against.

A Market Test for Ethnic Discrimination in the National Hockey League? A Game-Level Panel Data Approach

This article tests for salary discrimination based on player ethnicities in the National Hockey League across various geographical locations with a market model that analyzes every game played during the 2010-2011 season. Using both the relative share of game-team players on the starting roster and time on ice as inputs, results suggest that, relative to English Canadian players, French Canadian and American players playing on Canadian teams suffer from wage discrimination. Potential confounding factors that can influence the inferences, as well as the limitations, of the market model approach are discussed.

To discriminate or not to discriminate -- Is data aggregation the question?

Previous professional sports discrimination studies rely heavily on aggregated data to the game level and therefore do not control for unobservable within game heterogeneity. This article uses an established testing methodology for assessing discrimination among professional sports adjudicators and compares inferences when data are and are not aggregated above an influential factor that affects within game foul/penalty rates. Substantial differences in conclusions are found suggesting that a number of inferences in the literature relating to discrimination in various contexts may be fragile. The issue and findings have potential relevance to a wide range of related studies.

A Markov Model for Hockey: Manpower Differential and Win Probability Added

We extend the classic Poisson model of hockey based on score differential and time remaining in the game to include the effect of penalties, and derive the associated Markov win probability model given the goal/manpower differential state at any point in a hockey game. Given data from the 2008/9–2011/12 National Hockey League seasons (a total of 4,920 games) reporting second-by-second goal and manpower differentials (which results in roughly 17.7 million observations), we estimate the state dependent transition rates and win probabilities. The data reveal that even after controlling for the home edge afforded by visiting teams being penalized more frequently than home teams, the goal scoring rate for the home team is higher than for visiting teams at most equivalent manpower differential levels. We use the model to develop a new win probability added metric for evaluating individual players based on their incremental contribution to the probability of winning and illustrate its use and conservation properties.

A continuous income-based grade gap decomposition on university course grades

ABSTRACT The earnings premium for education, and higher education in particular, is well documented. This article examines the college achievement gap between students coming from positions of high and low socio-economic status. Other papers have also looked at this issue, often by employing, at least in part, an Oaxaca decomposition. Past papers artificially divided socio-economic status into binary groups of high and low, in order to employ the decomposition. Socio-economic status is innately a continuous variable. Therefore, we implement a continuous version of the Oaxaca decomposition. Higher socio-economic students are both slightly better prepared in terms of observable characteristics and have better returns to their characteristics than lower socio-economic students. Notable differences across results obtained from the binary and continuous decomposition methods are discussed.

The Source of the Cultural or Language Diversity Effects in the National Hockey League

This chapter reexamines the impact of cultural and language diversity on the production of winning hockey games to discern the underlying source(s) driving the effects. It makes inferences based on various analyses of micro-level data that include information relating to player interactions, which suggest that the diversity effects are a result of lower off-ice communication costs rather than reduced cultural dominance of the domestic group or on-ice synergies amongst homogeneous players. The inferences are of general interest to managerial economists who can increase firm-level productivity by hiring employees that speak similar languages and share ideas regardless of their cultural background.

Team-Level Referee Discrimination in the National Hockey League

Previous research on referee discrimination in penalty calling has been based on relative comparisons across race/ethnic groups, and does not discern whether the findings are based on players of a different or the same race/ethnicity. This paper tests for team-level discrimination amongst professional hockey referees, and finds that French-Canadian referees favor teams, in the form of fewer penalty calls, that have more French-Canadian players. The analysis is undertaken at penalty level to account for additional within-game referee biases and varying costs of player infractions across score margin game states.