Racial Integration as an Innovation: Empirical Evidence from Sports Leagues

Brian L. Goff, Robert Exley Mccormick () and Robert Tollison ()

American Economic Review, 2002, vol. 92, issue 1, pages 16-26

Abstract: This paper treats racial integration as an innovation in economic process in which economic entities find it advantageous to utilize potentially more productive inputs previously unavailable due to law, custom, or managerial discretion. Data on the racial integration of Major League Baseball and Atlantic Coast Conference basketball are employed to address this issue. The central question examined is which type of team integrated first—losers or winners? The results strongly support the idea that entrepreneurship trumps competitive rivalry; that is, winning teams led the process of racial integration.

Date: 2002
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1257/000282802760015586 (text/html)
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles/article_detail.php? ... ue_date=March%202002 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members.

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:92:y:2002:i:1:p:16-26

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.aeaweb.org/subscribe.html

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Review is edited by Robert Moffitt

More articles in American Economic Review from American Economic Association
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().