Todd L. Idson

Customer preferences, attendance and the racial structure of professional basketball teams

This paper examines the importance of customer-based discrimiantion in professional basketball over the 1980–81 to 1985–86 seasons. Empirical rsesults offer strong support of the hypothesis that, if fans prefer to see players of their own race, teams will be influenced in their selection of players by the racial composition of their market area. By the same token, attendance is found to be positively related to the extent to which the racial composition of the team matches that of the corresponding market area.

Chapter 33 Firm size and wages

Abstract Jobs differ along many dimensions including firm size. The wage gap due to firm size of 35% is comparable to the gender wage gap of 36% for men over women and greater than the wage gap of 14% for whites over black employees. The size-wage premium is larger for men and varies across industries. It is larger in the US than in other industrialized countries. Large firms demand a higher quality of labor defined by such observable characteristics as education, job tenure, and a higher fraction of full-time workers. Part 3 examines three behavioral explanations. (1) Productive employees are matched with able entrepreneurs to minimize the sum of wages and monitoring costs. (2) Big firms pay efficiency wages to deter shirking. (3) Big firms adopt a discretionary wage policy to share rents, or in Slichters words, “Wages over a considerable range reflect managerial discretion. When management can easily afford to pay high wages, they tend to do so.” We advance a productivity hypothesis. A large organization sets a higher performance standard that raises labor productivity but has to be supported by a compensating wage difference. In the service industries, the pace of work depends on the customer arrival rate. The economies of massed reserves generates a positive wage-size profile. The capital/labor ratio is higher in bigger firms which also are early in adopting new technologies. Both forces raise the demand for skilled labor where skill and productivity are often unobservable traits. Production organized around teams calls for conformance to common work rules which result in paying rents to infra-marginal team members. The odds of survival are higher for big firms which enable them to “produce” more durable employees who are more productive because they get more training. Firm size is a function of external market forces, technology, managerial decisions, and luck. The surplus of revenues over labor costs per employee is positively related to firm size for three reasons, lower prices for non-labor inputs, possibly greater market power, or larger overhead costs to amortize the sunk costs for capital and firm -specific work force. Rent sharing cannot be dismissed as an explanation for the wage-size premium. Taxation and regulation can also affect the size distribution of firms. The organization of work and the selection of employees (whose productive traits are not always observable) are responsible for the positive relation between wages and employer size.

Team production effects on earnings

Abstract The effects of team production on earnings is examined using the 1973 Quality of Employment Survey. I find that the earnings of nonunion workers are positively related to (i) team size, (ii) the extent to which supervisors encourage team work, and (iii) the helpfulness of members of the team. These results are robust to controls for establishment size, characteristics of the worker, and both industry and occupation.

Introducing a New Journal

versation between professors Leo Kahane, Steve Shmanske, and Paul Staudohar (all from California State University, Hayward). Following this conversation, Staudohar sought the counsel of Roger Noll (Stanford University), one of the most prominent persons in the field of sports economics. Noll favored the idea and agreed to serve on the board of editors. Todd Idson (Columbia University) was contacted and invited to join Kahane as coeditor of JSE. Staudohar, Kahane, and Idson began the process of securing the agreement of other key academics in the field to serve on the board. This effort resulted in (if we may) an all-star lineup of editorial board members. Kahane and Idson worked together on establishing the structure and policies for JSE, and after careful consideration, Sage Publications was selected as the publisher. Meanwhile, we learned that a similar journal was being organized by Paul Downward and Brian Davies at Staffordshire University in England. Both journals had contacted some of the same editorial board members, so it was logical to combine operations into one journal. This joining of forces produced a stronger international board of editors than would otherwise have been the case. The international

The Implications of Demographic-Specific Inflation Rates for Trends in Real Educational Wage Differentials

We use data from consumer expenditure surveys to investigate the impact on trends in real wage differentials of using group-specific price indexes. We find that inflation rates decrease monoton-ically with the education of the household head throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, and real educational wage differentials, calculated using education-specific price indexes, widened somewhat more than nominal differentials. We also find that differences by education level in fuel and energy consumption, whose relative prices increased during the 1970s, account for the majority of the educational index differences.

Editorial Board Changes

t the January 2015 annual meeting of The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) in San Diego, California, a number of Achanges to the Editorial Board took effect during the handover of the Editorship from Dr L. Henry Edmunds, Jr, to Dr G. Alexander Patterson. The following individuals rotated off after completing multiple terms of distinguished service to The Annals: Deputy Editors Drs Verdi J. DiSesa, Constantine Mavroudis, and John A. Odell; Associate Editors Drs Gary L. Grunkemeier, Richard Lee, Joseph I. Miller, Jr, and Norman J. Snow; and Editorial Board Members Drs Marshall L. Jacobs, Michael E. Jessen, James K. Kirklin, R. Scott Mitchell, and Gaetano Rocco. Drs DiSesa and Mavroudis served in multiple capacities during their tenure, first as Editorial Board Members, then as CME Associate Editors, before assuming Deputy Editor duties. Dr Odell began as an Associate Editor for feature articles before becoming a Deputy Editor. The hard work and long service that all of the departing individuals have dedicated to our field are appreciated not only by The Annals, but also by the larger cardiothoracic community. Their expertise has helped ensure the quality of our peer-review process and publications, which positively affects our readership and, ultimately, our patients. We thank them for their service and commitment.

The Effect of Household Characteristics on Household-Specific Inflation Rates: An Application to Trends in Child Poverty and Educational Real Wage Differentials

This paper investigates the effect demographic-specific inflation rates on the measured well-being of two population groups families with and without children, and families with different educational attainment. Our major findings are (1) families with children generally experienced lower inflation rates between 1969 and 1985 than did families without children, yet calculated trends in child poverty are not significantly affected by the use of group-specific price indexes, and (2) inflation rates decreased monotonically with the education of the household head throughout this period, so that real education wage differentials (calculated using educationspecific price indexes) widened more than nominal education wage differentials. This last finding indicates that the relative economic well-being of the less educated has declined by a greater extent than would be inferred from trends in nominal education wage differentials.