Measuring Market Power in Professional Baseball, Basketball, Football, and Hockey

Healy, Gerald T.,, Jing Ru Tan and Peter Orazem

ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Using Forbes magazine’s estimates of the current value and revenues of professional sports teams, we derive a long-run variant of the Lerner Index. We apply the strategy to professional teams in baseball, basketball, football, and hockey over the 2006–2019 period. All teams have positive and significant price-cost margins over the entire period. Analysis of variance shows that local market factors and past team performance have less impact on a team’s market power than do common league-wide effects. The strongest market power is in leagues with more aggressive revenue sharing policies. Price-cost margins are higher for professional teams in North American than for the most valuable European soccer teams, consistent with the stronger exemption from antitrust law in the United States and the weaker revenue sharing policies in Europe.

Date: 2020-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cul and nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstre ... 331a94a01b77/content
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring Market Power in Professional Baseball, Basketball, Football, and Hockey (2020)
Working Paper: Measuring Market Power in Professional Baseball, Basketball, Football and Hockey (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:isu:genstf:202001010800001030

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Curtis Balmer ().