Race and Ethnicity Assessment in Baseball Card Markets

Abstract

There is a growing literature investigating fan discrimination revealed in markets for sports memorabilia. Such estimates miss the mark for two reasons. First, simply measuring race as a binary variable may be less insightful than an alternative measure. Second, although it is the race perceptions of market participants that matter, past studies rely exclusively on researcher race/ethnicity assessment. The authors provide an estimation framework using continuous, market participant reports of race/ethnicity. The results show that past race/ethnicity results in card markets suffer from errors in variables and that continuous, market participant reports of race/ethnicity provide (carefully defined) "better" estimation results. The authors find that race/ethnicity matters and in a way is consistent with a model of statistical discrimination by those baseball fans who trade in the card market. The discrimination is against Black and Hispanic hitters and Black pitchers but not against Hispanic pitchers.