Lawrence Hadley

Performance evaluation of National Football League teams

Most recent empirical analyses of production in the sports economic literature have focused on Major League Baseball. This paper extends that literature by analysing football production in the National Football League (NFL). Using the Poisson regression model, we measure the performance of NFL teams and head coaches. The measure is based on a production process where player skills are converted into games won. The evidence reveals that quality coaching is an important component in the production process. It appears that efficient coaching can account for an additional three to four victories in a given season. Copyright

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.

Competitive Balance in the Aftermath of the 1994 Players’ Strike

A new interseasonal measure of competitive balance in a sports league is presented. It is based on a Markov model of a team’s probability of qualifying for postseason play given the performance of the team in the previous season. Transitional probabilities are estimated for Major League Baseball teams before and after the 1994 players’ strike. The results indicate that there has been a significant deterioration in competitive balance for the seasons following the strike. Probability density functions for the prestrike and poststrike eras are also presented.

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.

Final-offer arbitration in major league baseball: A nonparametric analysis

This study extends the non-parametric methodology for empirical efficiency analysis to allow for a double frontier based on perspective and applies the model to final-offer arbitration in major league baseball. Arbitration eligible players perceive their worth relative to other players who earn more with no better performance. Owners, on the other hand, perceive a players value relative to other players performing as well with lower salaries. The two different perspectives give rise to different perceived frontiers. The purpose of this paper is to analyze arbitration using this approach.

The migration of egyptian human capital to the arab oil-producing states: a cost-benefit analysis

The rate of return analysis is utilized to evaluate the profitability of exporting human capital from Egypt to the Arab oil-producing states from two alternative perspectives. A preliminary estimate of the internal rate of return from the perspective of the welfare of Egyptian nationals is extremely high in the case of Egyptian teachers in Saudi Arabia. From the alternative perspective of economic development in Egypt, existing gaps in the data make impossible at this time an accurate estimate of the rate of return. However, if Egyptians employed in the Gulf States were required to remit fixed portions of their income to Egypt and significant foreign transfer payments were received from the host countries, the migration of educated Egyptians would almost certainly be profitable from the second perspective as well.