Michael A. Leeds

Winner Take All in the NFL: The Effect of the Salary Cap and Free Agency on the Compensation of Skill Position Players

In an earlier paper, Kowalewski and Leeds showed that free agency and the salary cap brought profound changes to the level and nature of players’ salaries in the National Football League (NFL). Their study is limited, however, by the fact that—unlike most other professional athletes—football players are evaluated by position-specific statistics. The authors improve on their earlier work by performing quantile regressions on data for specific positions to show how free agency and the salary cap affected compensation. They show that the new bargaining regime greatly increased the reward to performance.

A stadium by any other name: the value of naming rights.

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of professional sports teams have sold the naming rights for their facilities to private firms. Although some policy makers have protested the private sectors appropriation of naming rights, no one has questioned the value of this strategy to the firms that buy the naming rights. The authors use a one-step version of event analysis to show that naming rights do not have a lasting impact on the profitability of the firms that buy them.

Do Changes in Classroom Techniques Matter? Teaching Strategies and Their Effects on Teaching Evaluations.

Abstract Advocates of active teaching techniques, such as group assignments and discussion sessions, claim that such techniques increase what students learn and improve their evaluations of the professor. We used a survey of instructors in introductory economics classes at Temple University to test whether active teaching increases how much students feel they learn and how highly they regard their instructors. We found that active teaching did not improve either perceived learning or student evaluations, leading us to question how valuable these techniques are in introductory economics classes.

Do Good Olympics Make Good Neighbors

Most studies of mega-events such as Olympic Games find a relatively small impact on the cities that host them. One reason given for this finding is that the event displaces tourists who otherwise would have come to the city. This paper documents such displacement by showing that expenditure at ski resorts in Colorado rose as a result of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. In addition to supporting previous studies, the spillover effect suggests that cities and states that gain from spillovers might want to support bids for events by nearby cities.

Property values and pension underfunding in the local public sector

Abstract This paper reexamines the empirical implication of the C. Tiebout ( J. Pol. Econ. 64 , 416–424 (1956)) hypothesis, taking account of the fact that many municipal pensions are grossly underfunded. OLS results show that underfunding has no impact on local property values. The motives for incomplete funding of pensions are also examined and are built into a simultaneous equation model. The OLS results are confirmed and some light is shed on factors leading to the underfunding of pensions.

Gold, Silver, and Bronze: Determining National Success in Men’s and Women’s Summer Olympic Events

Summary We add to the literature on Olympic performance by explicitly studying the determinants of women’s performance at the Games.We estimate separate models of medal production for men and women over the last four Summer Olympic Games. The production of medals is a function of capital, labor, and total factor productivity (TFP). We use real GDP per capita and population - two variables that appear in almost all Olympic studies - as proxies for capital and labor. Our measure of TFP is a vector of variables that captures a nation’s willingness and ability to marshal its resources to promote Olympic performance and variables that determine its willingness to support its women. Because the dependent variable is a count measure, we estimate the production function using a negative binomial framework. We find that the determinants of success by a nation’s women closely resemble the determinants for its men. We also show that some determinants of gold medal counts differ from the determinants of silver and bronze medals. Our findings suggest that nations can improve the medal performance of men and women by following policies that increase the political and economic participation of women.

Take me out to the Yakyushiai: determinants of attendance at Nippon Professional Baseball games.

The authors use data that are collected from the 2007 season to study attendance at Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) games. Like Major League Baseball (MLB) teams, Japanese teams set price in the inelastic portion of the demand curve, but standard explanations for low prices do not apply. The authors also find some evidence that the visiting team’s fans play a greater role in NPB than in MLB. Games in domed stadiums or between teams in different leagues also draw more fans. Finally, attendance is greater at games between better teams and games that the home team is more likely to win.

Is bad news always bad? The impact of Floyd Landis's rise and fall on Phonak

In the space of one week, cyclist Floyd Landis went from hero to villain when his remarkable comeback to win the 2006 Tour de France was nullified by a positive drug test. I use event study techniques to analyse the impact of Landiss rise and fall on the profitability of Phonak, his teams sponsor. I find that neither his spectacular win nor his rapid fall had an immediate impact on Phonak but that there was a significant cumulative abnormal return to Phonak stock in the wake of these events. I conclude that Phonak benefited from both the good and bad news about Landis.

Rank-order tournaments and worker incentives

ConclusionIt has been shown that a single rank-order tournament fails to provide incentives after the completion of the tournament. The firm may attempt to monitor workers afterwards, but this undercuts the rationale for tournaments—the minimization of monitoring costs. Proper incentives are possible in the context of tournaments only if they are continuously repeated. The nature of these secondary tournaments depends, however, on the information gleaned from tournament results. If the result of the tournament reflects random luck, winners and losers continuously compete for a prize equal to their expected marginal revenue product. If firm-specific aptitudes are revealed, the firm may seek to exploit its monopsony power over winners of the initial contest by reducing the prize structure of later tournaments below expected marginal revenue product. If the results reflect individual-specific differences in ability, a hierarchy of tournaments results.

Does It Pay to Build Through the Draft in the National Basketball Association

Many National Basketball Association executives and analysts claim that the best way to contend for a championship is to get very high draft picks, which may require losing many games. We test whether building through the draft promotes winning in several ways. We test whether having more and higher draft picks promotes improvement and whether giving draft picks more playing time helps teams win more. We find that the draft is not necessarily the best road to success. An excellent organization and General Manager better enable teams to succeed even without high draft picks.