Empirical Essays in Sport Management.

Abstract

This dissertation contains three separate empirical essays in sports economics with each chapter focusing on a key area of investigation in the discipline – consumer demand, the labor market for players and competitive balance. The first chapter analyzes secondary market demand for National Football League (NFL) attendance through the utilization of personal seat license and season ticket rights sales data. The use of this unique data avoids the venue capacity constraint which has dominated previous NFL attendance estimations. The analysis uncovers strong consumer preferences for high-quality seating locations, clear differences in demand between NFL markets with respect to short-term team quality and evidence that personal seat licenses are depreciable assets.

The second chapter evaluates the relationship between training and employment outcomes in the context of the North American professional baseball labor market. Using historical Major League Baseball (MLB) Draft data, the study examines labor market outcomes as measured by probability of reaching MLB and MLB career duration. Logistic regression models show that players drafted out of four-year institutions have significantly higher probabilities of reaching MLB while hazard modeling illustrates that players drafted directly from high school have significantly longer careers once they reach MLB. Findings from this specialized labor market support in part the positive theorized relationship between accumulated training and employment outcomes.

The final chapter examines the historical behavior of competitive balance in college football and also evaluates Rottenberg’s invariance proposition (IP) in response to three key institutional changes in the sport’s business structure. Results illustrate increasing levels of game uncertainty, but otherwise relatively little change in balance over time. Based on the sport’s supreme popularity, these results raise the question of how important competitive balance truly is to the long-term financial viability of NCAA conferences. Additionally, the use of time series techniques uncovers mixed support for the IP with only slight evidence suggesting any structural changes in balance in response to the events identified. Time series techniques reinforce the finding that balance has been relatively stable over the history of the sport.