Competitive Balance in the National Hockey League after Unrestricted Free Agency and the Salary Cap

Travis Lee

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In the large literature on issues related to competitive balance, studies tend to find no significant effect of structural changes. However in the National Hockey League, the introduction of unrestricted free agency in 1995 and a hard salary cap in 2005 might reasonably be expected to affect competitiveness. The present note measures between-season competitive balance as the correlation between the current and prior years’ winning percentages. The method is to regress winning percentage on lagged winning percentage and a set of controls. The finding is that competitive balance increased after unrestricted free agency and the salary cap were implemented.

Keywords: National Hockey League; competitive balance; collective bargaining; unrestricted free agency; salary cap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09-15
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