Nancy J. Burnett

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.

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.

School Consolidations and Teacher Incentive Contracts

We construct an agency-based model of incentive contracting within the education system. We use this framework to evaluate first-best, second-best, and pooling contracts under a variety of assumptions germane to the consolidation of elementary and secondary schools. By introducing a monitoring technology, an auditor, which serves as liaison between the principal (superintendent) and the agent (teacher), information constraints induced by school consolidations can be alleviated. Using this framework, we consider various policy issues such as how and where teacher incentive contracts might succeed, what may cause incentive contracts to fail, and how to determine optimal school size.