Abstract
Although a great deal of research has focused on Major League Baseball (MLB) players' salaries, there has been little attempt to derive a professional golfer's salary based upon tournament performance. MLB players' current salaries are a combination of two factors: past performances and predicted future performances. Professional golfers' earnings, however, are determined based upon how well each player performs in the tournaments entered throughout the course of a season. In other words, their earnings are a direct result of how efficiently a golfer can earn money given their statistical performance. This paper estimates golfers' earnings using four performance measures: putting average, driving distance, driving accuracy and the number of sand saves while controlling for the number of tournament starts. Using the estimated earnings equation, the relative performance of each golfer is calculated.
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