Gains from Specialization and Free Agency: The Story from the Gridiron

Abstract

Free agency, National Football League, Salary, Specialization,

Catching a draft: on the process of selecting quarterbacks in the National Football League amateur draft

“…Specifically, salary models for NFL positions are considered more formally in a pair of companion papers by the authors (Berri and Simmons 2009;Simmons and Berri 2009). Those papers analysed the reported pay of NFL quarterbacks and running backs, respectively, and found evidence of substantial positive salary premia, after controlling for player experience and productivity, for players drafted in rounds one and two, but not thereafter.…”

Specialization and matching in professional services firms

“…Afendulis and Kessler (2007) quantify some of the costs that result from this in one particular context.3 One exception isSimmons and Berri (2009).4 Hamilton, Ho, and Goldman (2000) use a similar identification strategy, relying on day of hospital admission.5 Iranzo et al (2008) illustrate a dynamic-programming approach based onOlley and Pakes (1996) to overcome this same challenge. C RAND 2010.…”

The Returns to Scarce Talent

“…Several studies of salary in professional team sports use quantile regression estimation since log salary measures tend to have even greater kurtosis values than standard occupations (Berri & Simmons, 2009;Hamilton, 1997;Simmons & Berri, 2009;Vincent & Eastman, 2009). Of course, OLS is the best linear unbiased estimator provided that the error distribution is homoscedastic.…”