Strike Three: Umpires' Demand for Discrimination

Christopher A. Parsons, Johan Sulaeman, Michael C. Yates and Daniel Hamermesh

No 13665, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We explore umpires' racial/ethnic preferences in the evaluation of Major League Baseball pitchers. Controlling for umpire, pitcher, batter and catcher fixed effects and many other factors, strikes are more likely to be called if the umpire and pitcher match race/ethnicity. This effect only exists where there is little scrutiny of umpires' behavior -- in ballparks without computerized systems monitoring umpires' calls, at poorly attended games, and when the called pitch cannot determine the outcome of the at-bat. If a pitcher shares the home-plate umpire's race/ethnicity, he gives up fewer runs per game and improves his team's chance of winning. The results suggest that standard measures of salary discrimination that adjust for measured productivity may generally be flawed. We derive the magnitude of the bias generally and apply it to several examples.

JEL-codes: J44 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
Note: LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published as Parsons, Christopher A., Johan Sulaeman, Michael C. Yates, and Daniel S. Hamermesh. 2011. "Strike Three: Discrimination, Incentives, and Evaluation" American Economic Review, 101(4): 1410-35.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13665.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Strike Three: Umpires' Demand for Discrimination (2008)
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:nbr:nberwo:13665

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13665

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().