Journal of Sports Economics

This article explicitly compares the incentive and sorting theories of tournament performance in road races. Regressions omitting controls for runner ability suggest that runners record faster times the greater the loss they would suffer from finishing below their prerace ranking. However, the relationship between prize money at risk and finishing time weakens or vanishes with these controls. These results strongly suggest that races with large prizes record faster times because they attract faster runners, not because they encourage all runners to run faster.

This article provides estimates of technical efficiency for a panel of managers in English soccer’s Premier League for the period 1992 to 1998. In contrast to other studies of sporting team production, efficiency is estimated at the level of the individual manager rather than the club. Fixed and random effects models are used to generate managerial efficiency scores assuming that efficiency is both time invariant and time varying. The efficiency rankings of the different time invariant models are very similar. In contrast, the temporal structure and the estimation procedures of the time-varying models produce very different results. There is evidence that managerial efficiency has fallen over the sample period.

This article analyzes the characteristics and incentive effects of contractual practices in professional boxing. A boxer’s “purse” is linked to past rather than contemporaneous performance, thereby creating an incentives problem. Although consumption-smoothing considerations alleviate this problem, savings act as further insurance, and the likelihood of moral hazard increases. Observation of a boxer being poorly prepared for a fight after earning a very large purse is consistent with this prediction. These disappointing outcomes are likely driven by the absence of a strategic principal in the boxing market and by the prevalence of “casual” boxing fans.

This article compares the PGA Tour to the LPGA by examining the relationship between skills and earnings on the two tours. Men on the PGA Tour play for bigger purses than do the women in the LPGA tournaments. But the men also play more rounds of golf over longer golf courses in front of more spectators and exhibit greater levels of skill than the women. The statistical results show which golf skills are the most valuable by estimating the effect of the skill on earnings. Furthermore, the results show that once skill levels are accounted for, women are not underpaid compared to men. Even though the tournament form of compensation rewards the relative skill levels within each tournament, the professional golf industry appears to reward the absolute level of skill with no gender bias.

Past studies have only uncovered a limited amount of evidence regarding salary discrimination in the National Hockey League (NHL). Only French Canadian defensemen sometimes seemed to be underpaid. It has been argued recently that the lack of evidence may be more a reflection of excessive aggregation than an absence of pay discrimination. In the present article, both national origin and the location of a player’s team are taken into account in salary regressions. The main outcome of the study is that salary discrimination based on team location appears to be a weak but pervasive phenomenon, more surely so in English Canada. An incidental outcome is that players located in English Canada cities were underpaid during the 1993-1994 season.