Lee Van Scyoc

Traditional or Intensive Course Lengths? A Comparison of Outcomes in Economics Learning

The length of a course in economics does influence student learning in microeconomics, but longer term retention does not appear to be related to course length.

A Report on the Economic Literacy of Adults

Test of Economic Literacy (TEL) scores from a sample of 942 adults are analyzed in terms of a number of factors. These adult TEL scores were also compared with high school student performance, with the latter outperforming the former. As with the scores of high school students, adult scores were positively related to both the level of education achieved and the completion of an economics course.

Adverse selection, seller reputation and buyer insurance in online auctions for 1960s-era collectible baseball cards

We investigate the differences between Beckett book values and eBay auction prices using an original data set of 876 auctions for 30 baseball cards from the 1960s era. We find that cards of lower quality generally sell (on eBay) above book price, whereas cards of higher quality generally sell below book price. We find that both the presence of buyer insurance and the number of bids increase eBay prices relative to book values and that the sellers reputation and the number of bids increase the probability that the eBay price will be greater than the corresponding book value.

Compensation discrimination for defensive players: applying quantile regression to the National Football League market for linebackers and offensive linemen.

Keefer’s recent article in the Journal of Sports Economics, “Compensation discrimination for defensive players: applying quantile regression to the National Football League market for linebackers,” finds wage discrimination in the National Football League market for linebackers. Following Keefer, we examine both ordinary least squares and quantile analysis, as well as Oaxaca and quantile treatment effects decompositions though we explore the market not only for linebackers but also for offensive linemen and limit our study to rookie players. We would expect to find stronger evidence of discrimination, as rookies are captured sellers. However, we find no pattern of discrimination against Blacks.

Testing for competitive balance

We present two tests for the hypothesis that a league is competitively balanced, identifying in each case the appropriate statistic as well as its sampling distribution. We then apply these tests to Major League Baseball and the National Football League. We demonstrate how these tests can be applied to full sports leagues, or to just intradivisional play, and to both single season and multiple season outcomes. We also show how one of our statistics is related to existing measures of competitive balance, and note the possibility that, because our statistics have known sampling distributions, knowledge may ultimately allow them to be transformed into measures that are comparable between leagues of different sizes and season lengths.

Compensation Discrimination for Wide Receivers: Applying Quantile Regression to the National Football League

Keefer’s recent article in the Journal of Sports Economics (2013) finds evidence of wage discrimination in the National Football League (NFL) market for linebackers. We examine the market for NFL wide receivers using similar techniques as Keefer, though we explore only rookies rather than all current players and wide receivers rather than linebackers. While we would expect to find stronger evidence of discrimination in the rookie market, as rookies are captured sellers, we find no pervasive pattern of pay discrimination by race in this market.

‘The best defence…’ or optimal offence/defence spending ratios in the NFL

An original data set built from all 32 National Football League (NFL) teams, covering 2000–2009, is used to produce a production function for professional football. We use spending on salaries, divided between offensive and defensive players, as inputs to produce season wins. Our data suggest that the optimal strategy is simply to have a strategy, meaning teams with balanced spending tend to do worse than those with a more strategic allocation towards either offence or defence.